The Civil Court of Florence has ordered the ASL Toscana Centro to pay approximately one million euros in compensation to the family of a woman who died of cancer after being given an incorrect diagnosis.
The story is told by Florentine Courier. In 2014, the woman, a 40-year-old from Empoli, had turned to a specialist clinic of the ASL in Fucecchio because she had noticed a small lump in her breast.
The doctor examined her and performed a fine needle aspiration. Then he sent the sample to the laboratory for analysis. A few days later, the test result was a sigh of relief: benign formation. The oncologist had thus reassured the patient.
In the following months, however, the patient began to feel worse and worse. Until, fifteen months after the needle aspiration, new tests revealed that the laboratory had made a tragic mistake: the nodule was actually a malignant tumor, which in the meantime had generated several metastases. Shortly thereafter, the woman would die, leaving behind a husband and two minor daughters.
Before leaving, the patient had filed a lawsuit against the ASL to request compensation for the damages suffered due to that wrong diagnosis. After her death, the proceedings were continued by her family, until the sentence issued in recent days by the Court of Florence: the Health Authority was ordered to pay 950 thousand euros plus interest.
The medical error resulting from an incorrect cytological diagnosis – the sentence states – reduced the woman’s chances of survival by over 70%. The responsibility for the incident, in particular, would be of the pathologist and his staff, who made the wrong diagnosis on the sample.
“Up until now,” commented Neapolitan lawyer Valerio Minucci, the lawyer for the woman’s family, “sentences of this type had established a causal link between the error that leads to a late diagnosis and the damage to the patient’s quality of life. But in this case it has clearly emerged that if my client had been treated from the beginning for the malignant tumor, which was still in the early stages, she would almost certainly have survived. Therefore, a direct causal link has been established between a delayed diagnosis and death.”
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