An interview. ATI doctor Elena Copaciu defends the doctors from St. Pantelimon: “The prosecutors must prove their accusations. I have never encountered something like this in 34 years in ATI” – HotNews.ro

“The shock in the medical community is great! ” said ATI doctor Elena Copaciu. In communication with HotNews.ro, Copaciu says that he is waiting for the results of the investigation in the case of the two doctors from St. Pantelimon, but he refuses to believe that “two young and very professionally trained doctors were killing in the intensive care unit”. The two female doctors were arrested on Thursday, and charged with aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder with premeditation.

With information from HotNews.ro, Copaciu says that events like this and the way in which they are published make the patient vulnerable, first. The doctor also mentions that the overload of front-line medical staff, due to the manpower crisis, is an undeniable fact, with consequences on both sides.

Between 2007 and 2015, Copaciu was the chief physician at the ATI Clinic in the Emergency University Hospital of Bucharest.

Confidence in the health system decreases even more

Events like this reduce trust in the health care system, “especially in the ATI specialty, where patients leave their vital actions in the hands of doctors and the medical team”, says Elena Copaciu, in a discussion by HotNews.ro.

“Events like this and the way they are revealed make the patient vulnerable,” said the doctor. “Therefore the greatest harm is done to the patient with such an approach. it’s an investigation, ok, we all want to know what the results are and how they were arrived at, because it’s not every day that doctors are accused of premeditated murder .We want to know what the expert opinions were based on and how strong the claims are from the medico-legal file. This is something we all want to learn from. and to be sure that the scientific evidence is unique”, explained Elena Copaciu for HotNews.ro.

“The shock in the medical community is huge! “

“I saw with surprise the stone that was in the agora of my young colleagues, ATI doctors at St. Pantelimon. I don’t think doctors have ever been accused of premeditated murder in the country! The shock in the medical community is huge! And the shock wave has been driven into the public knowingly or unknowingly, by prosecutors and the media,” he wrote, in a post on FacebookATI doctor Elena Copaciu, with more than 30 years of experience.

“Respecting the opinion of the innocent is the right of every citizen. Who benefits from revealing the names of the accused or marching in spells!? Why is the arrest suspended for 30 days, so that it does not affect the witnesses, when they worked side by side with the witnesses for 5 months after the investigation began! Wasn’t the house arrest without contact with witnesses better? The unspoken message to the medical community is that they want to humiliate the two doctors!”, she says.

The ATI doctor said in the communication with the editors that he refuses to believe that “two young and well-trained doctors had previously committed murder in the intensive care unit”, and said that “the staff must -prosecution to prove their allegations”.

“I have never encountered something like this in 34 years in ATI”, affirms Elena Copaciu.

On the other hand, the ATI doctor mentions that we need to talk more about the overwork of frontline medical workers and the crisis of workers, a situation that has not changed for years.

“Here, people are on call for 18 or 24 hours, depending on whether it’s a weekend or not, and European guidelines require that there should be 11 hours of rest after 24-hour call. And most European countries have changed their duty schedules so that duty hours are 12 hours. That is, it starts in the evening around 6, 7 and lasts 12 hours until morning. And the program is covered by the other doctors until that time, which is 18 or 19. These guidelines are respected in other European countries and the human right to rest. In our country, the rules of the guard of the Ministry of Health are decades old,” the doctor says, and they are not always respected.

“Deficiencies in the health care system accumulate in a cascade and everything falls like a lightning rod on the doctors in the first line, as is ATI!”, notes Copaciu in the opinion expressed on Facebook.

“In the specific case, ATI Pantelimon, an emergency hospital, is responsible for all emergency patients brought by ambulances into the UPU (although, usually, emergency patients from the pre-hospital must arrive where is there free space in the ATI). The normal act in Romania says that if the hospital where the emergency patient arrived in the ATI does not have a place, the doctors in the hospital are obliged to find a place for them in another hospital, it is that, being distributors, and other hospitals rarely accept to take over these patients, also because of the lack of seats. At the same time, as a result of the ASSMB/MS schism in Bucharest, large well-equipped hospitals, with lines of defense in many specialties, are operating under continuous conditions.

This is how you end up with a UPU full of critics (concrete example, this week UPU Ploiești, 10 patients, ATI clogged, patients transported to Bucharest).

Then there are critical patients who are still dependent on advanced life support and can no longer support life independently and remain on machines for weeks or months. Since we do not have a network of secondary units to take these patients, they are still in intensive hospital rehabilitation (this is the case for many of the patients who died in St. Pantelimon, according to the judgments made public by sources, from the files)”, writes Copaciu.

About a lack of empathy, in both senses

When asked by HotNews how he sees the accusations in the public space that doctors in the state system do not have compassion and treat patients in a hurry, Copaciu answered:

“I never understood and did not allow as the head of the department this lack of compassion, because the relatives of those who arrive at the hospital in a serious condition, on the operating table or in recovery, with the vital functions unstable. . You can’t put something like that on them emotionally, that’s what they need, right?”.

“But also think about the conditions in which doctors work, it is not enough to talk about the crisis of manpower in ATI”, affirms the doctor.

“And to give you a concrete example, Pitesti County Emergency Hospital is currently working with a 63-year-old doctor who understands that she wants to retire, to go there. And with a 75-year-old doctor called from retirement to administer anesthesia in the morning.

And it is the County Emergency Hospital. After 2pm, it’s the only one in the whole county. And they have 35 beds in Intensive Care. How do you deal with something like this?”, draws the attention of Copaciu.

msgid “The system slaps the wrists”

“Also, Ploiești County has 6 anesthetists, as far as I know, and they are trying to deal with doctors who come from Bucharest temporarily for guards, rag, so to speak. These patients can’t be seen well by so few doctors, can they? We need to talk about this too”, said the doctor ATI. .

“Emergency hospitals in Bucharest are overcrowded, and the pressure on staff, especially ATI, is very high,” says Elena Copaciu.

“So Pantelimon, I don’t even know how many guards these guys made. Now, if Dr. Voicu was dismissed, these two girls are in custody, and there is still a holiday, there are not many people left who can provide the service at the time this. And the ambulances come with sick people, because that’s it, people get sick, and the system drags on the wrists”.

Prosecutors charge them with aggravated murder

HotNews provided more details from the prosecutor’s report submitted to the court for the arrest of the two female doctors. The document contains testimonials, transcripts of audio recordings and wiretaps.

One of the two female doctors killed the “Lady with the scythe” at the hospital, prosecutors said in the report. “The nurses said it was about the alleged MM, so called because many of her patients die as a result of the injection devices being altered, ” the prosecutor’s report says.

Prosecutors present the comparison between the data from the memory of the injection devices, which show a sudden drop in the amount of noradrenaline given to the patients, and the observation sheets. In the records, the real reduction does not appear, the real one, which, however, was still recorded in the memory of the device.

The prosecutor’s office also presented in the report the findings of INML experts, who say that “we understand that there is a difference between these deficiencies in the provision of medical care (sudden reduction in noradrenaline dose) and death.” there is a causal link“.

At the same time, there are sections in the Prosecutor’s Office report that are difficult or impossible to prove in court, according to judicial practice, HotNews said. At one point, the prosecution uses the testimony of a nurse who says she received a question from one of the doctors “seemingly”, not verbally: “Why didn’t he die?” or “Isn’t he dead yet?.

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