The investigation into the case of lifesaving sessions skipped due to continuous machinery failures closes without criminal charges
Tommaso Fregatti
January 14, 2021
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Genoa – There were no conducts of criminal relevance but certainly there were moral and managerial responsibilities. Not so much the health management of the polyclinic San Martino, who «promptly faced the breakdowns and he tried to solve the problems of the sick by activating evening shifts as well ”, but rather on the part of public health. A public health that is defined by the prosecutor as “obsolete and unable to respond to the needs of citizens”.
In the papers of the investigation into the San Martino radiotherapy scandal – last December due to a series of repeated failures and malfunctions of the equipment, cancer patients had had to wait weeks in order to access life-saving treatment and others had been forced to go for treatment by bus in another city – a harsh attack by magistrates on the system of care in general emerges. Not only in Liguria but throughout Italy.
“Acquitted” the San Martino
The substitute prosecutor Massimo Terrile (the same who investigates the collapse of the Morandi Bridge and the death of 43 people). Terrile acquits the San Martino and rejects the Italian health system as a whole. He is responsible for the failures that also led to a 15 percent reduction in patients treated compared to the previous year.
The Public Prosecutor, in retracing the whole story, underlines how «the numerical insufficiency and obsolescence of equipment intended for diagnosis and therapies do not constitute a specific problem of the oncological radiotherapy unit of the San Martino hospital ». And he highlights how “the almost daily complaints from almost all public health facilities in the country about the unacceptable length of waiting lists, also referable to serious diseases, document the existence of generalized deficits dating back over time, both in terms of personnel be in terms of numerical insufficiency of the equipment and in terms of their failure to promptly renew ».
A dramatic picture which, according to the magistrate, would be a consequence of «general policy choices and the chronic insufficiency of financial resources destined for public health». Also in the reasons – accepted by the judge who thus dismissed the criminal proceedings – it is also highlighted how the Policlinico San Martino has in a certain sense suffered the age of the machinery. So much so that for the Prosecutor “the functionality of the department had been conditioned even before the failure of the accelerator by repeated, albeit temporary, failures to other equipment”.
Problems and solutions
Indeed, the Genoese hospital itself promptly intervened to try to reduce the inconvenience of users. “The problems resulting from the failure – adds the Prosecutor – were promptly addressed in a first phase through an increase in the hours of irradiation of the two accelerators available at the Asl 2 Savonese (San Paolo Hospital), the activation of an evening shift at the Galliera hospital and the strengthening of the radiant activity on Saturday morning ». The opening of the investigation into the radiology scandal at San Martino was born following a series of complaints that arrived last December at the Prosecutor’s Office.
“More attention to Oncology”
Among these, that of a 45-year-old mother (assisted in the proceedings by the lawyer Francesca Palmero) to whom the same doctors of San Martino had advised to carry out the radiotherapy cycles for a tumor in a hospital far from Genoa (at San Matteo di Pavia) because at San Martino the times would have been too long and he was at risk for his health. The woman’s complaint was followed by others who had shown how the cancer patients had been forced by the hospital management of San Martino to go by bus to the hospital of Savona to be able to carry out the planned radiotherapy cycles.
Satisfaction with storing on the procedure arrives from the same Genoese hospital: “Notwithstanding that the Polyclinic – it is indicated in a note – will continue to modernize the instruments dedicated to patient care, the structure has welcomed the news, after having made itself available to the competent the investigations they have successful and that push the new General Management to devote even more attention to an area, the oncological one, which has always been the excellence of San Martino ».
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