A court of first instance in Madrid handed down a judgment, dated June 30, 2023, condemning the insurer of the Molina de Segura hospital and estimating the demand for compensation of approximately 125,000 euros for a Murcian patient. . The case was taken by the lawyer of the association El Defensor del Paciente, Ignacio Martínez.
MCC, a 39-year-old patient residing in Murcia, suffered from knee pain for which she underwent mosaicplasty of a knee on June 12, 2017 at the Molina de Segura Hospital -as a concerted center of Murcian public health-. In said surgery, on behalf of said hospital, the anesthetist acted, who administered local spinal anesthesia to the patient. After surgery, MCC began with a torpid evolution, with a diagnosis of lesion of the femoral nerve and L3-L4 nerve roots for which he received rehabilitation treatment until discharge with serious neuropathic sequelae, no less than three years later, the November 3, 2020. During all this time, specialists in neurosurgery, traumatology and neurophysiology attributed spinal anesthesia as the only possible cause of the severe damage in their reports, according to the Patient Advocate in a statement.
The issue is, according to this organization, that “in the information given to the patient by the anesthetist, before being operated on, at no time was she warned of the possibility that local spinal anesthesia could cause damage.” severe and chronic neuropathic diseases, despite the fact that such risk was well known as typical, and thus is included in the informed consent models of the specialty, and specifically of Sedar (Spanish Society of Anesthesiology, Reanimation and Pain Therapeutics). ).
Due to these facts, the patient turned to the association El Defensor del Paciente, which referred her case to the lawyer specializing in health law Ignacio Martínez. “Filing the lawsuit against the insurer of the Molina de Segura Hospital, its procedural representation minimized the damages and denied that in any case they had anesthesia as their origin”, all of which now refutes the sentence, which indicates the following:
“Based on the exposed doctrine, in the case at hand, the first controversy that arises is the one related to the cause of the damage, since the anesthetist is accused of malpractice, a deficient information to the patient about the risks that anesthesia entailed. spinal cord, from whose administration the damages suffered by the patient were derived, imputing part of the damages against the patient’s previous pathologies and another part to the actions of the orthopedist and not the anesthetist, without his bad judgment concurring either. praxis due to defects in the informed consent regarding the type of anesthesia that was applied to the plaintiff. In this regard, the defendant has justified and not disproved both the actual existence of the two sequelae for which it is claimed: injury to the femoral nerve and nerve roots, as well as the fact that they derive from the administration of spinal anesthesia. The malpractice has been accredited, due to the deficient information provided, with sufficient entity as has been exposed to justify the responsibility of the defendant.
Regarding the assessment of the damage, the judge estimates it at €266,354; however, it considers: «…moderation appropriate, given that the consequences of said lack of information cannot be equated to those that would derive from malpractice on the part of the defendant anesthetist, since the patient was only deprived of the possibility of postponing or even canceling the planned surgical intervention, seeking other opinions from different specialists or, even, having gone to a different center and a different anesthetist to carry out that intervention, which is indicated and necessary due to its previous condition and the technique used being adequate, This must necessarily have an impact on the amount of compensation for the damages caused which, appreciating the circumstances of the case, it is considered that they must be weighed by setting it at half of the total claimed. The defendant is sentenced to pay the amount of 133,177.14 euros, from which must be subtracted the amount of the excess that appears in the policy without a doubt, which implies a delimitation of coverage, for an amount of 30,000 euros.
On the occasion of this case, the president of the El Defensor del Paciente association, Carmen Flores, calls for professionals to scrupulously comply with their duty to inform patients of all the risks and alternatives involved in each medical act, in a manner that they consent fully aware of what they are going to submit to. In addition, beyond the fact that this compliance is formalized in the pertinent form, it is recalled that it is correct that this be preceded by verbal and understandable information for the patient. The lawsuit was brought by the lawyer Ignacio Martínez, a specialist in health law attached to the association El Defensor del Paciente.
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