Brindisi, 77, died in the emergency room waiting for the visit: investigated by the ASL leaders and the two doctors who had called the prosecutor’s office because they were left alone

TOASTS – The ER was full of patients with only two doctors on duty, and while waiting to be seen, a 77-year-old woman died in the waiting room. After the family’s complaint, five people are under investigation, including the two doctors and the heads of the ASL. It happened at the Perrino hospital in Brindisi on November 16th.

The woman’s relatives are asking for justice, they want to know if there is any responsibility for the death of their relative. The Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened the investigation, and has entered the two doctors in the emergency room, the director general of the Brindisi local health authority, the medical director of the Perrino hospital and the head of the department in the register of suspects.

The story is quite complex, and shows all the limits of the hospital health system and especially the emergency rooms with no staff and few doctors. It was precisely the two doctors on duty on the evening of 16 November who requested the intervention of the magistrate of the Brindisi public prosecutor’s office to report the difficulties in being able to guarantee assistance to all waiting patients. There were too many, and most of them in code orange, to visit, as required by law, within 15 minutes. Impossible for the two doctors to be able to guarantee those times.

The two professionals, after having tried in vain to call the top management of the hospital to explain the situation and ask for help, as a last resort they alerted the magistrate on duty, who in turn called the carabinieri to intervene in the emergency room. A report drawn up by the two doctors shows that that evening there were 24 patients waiting in orange code waiting for their turn, and another 10 were in green and blue code. To which we must add the patients left over by colleagues in the afternoon. Before calling the prosecutor’s office, the two health workers tried in vain to contact the hospital’s management, without any response. Meanwhile, the 77-year-old woman who arrived from the Ostuni hospital in the Brindisi emergency room in hypoglycemia died while waiting for treatment.