Portugal’s ombudsman says INEM must compensate families if delays contributed to deaths of loved ones
The woes of INEM (Portugal national institute for emergency medicine) continue today, in spite of all government assurances that dramas of the last week ‘are being handled’.
The fact that at least 11 people died waiting for ambulances – even waiting for 112 emergency calls on their behalf to be answered – is not being allowed to go away.
Today, the outrage of the daughter of a 77-year-old man who died after waiting two hours for medical response in Vila Nova de Cacela, in the Algarve, is splashed over the front page of tabloid Correio da Manhã, just as the country’s Ombudsman insists that INEM will have to compensate the families of people who died if it can be proved that delays in emergency response contributed to their deaths.
Talking to Antena 1, Maria Lúcia Amaral said that it is absolutely fundamental to know what went wrong, in order to determine responsibility.
“These things don’t depend on the emotions of the moment”, she said. “They depend on what the law says.
“What the law says is that if in each case, in a court case (…), it is concluded that the assumptions defined by the law have been met, then yes, under the terms of the law, the state must compensate”.
Ms Amaral was referring to the cases of deaths allegedly related to delays in response during the Pre-Hospital Emergency Technicians’ strike – especially on the day it coincided with the civil service strike on November 4.
She stressed that warnings had been made two weeks previously by the Fire Brigades League about the difficulty they were having in liaising with INEM and hospitals, and the general ‘dysfunction of the system’ regarding to emergency response.
“What the League asked us to do was to realise how serious the situation could become,’ she said, adding that at the time, she immediately spoke to the Ministry of Health.
Clearly, as events have shown, this was not enough.
“Either coordination between all the organisations improves or we start to fail and the state fails in absolutely definitive situations, where people’s lives are at stake.
“The entities involved have to sit down at the table, they have to consciously analyse why everything is working so badly and avoid it under the aegis of those who decide, which is the governing political power,” she added.
But there is another ‘fly in the ointment’: syndicate leader Rui Lazaro insists that INEM gave the union only THREE MINUTES WARNING of the need to provide ‘minimum services’ on November 4.
An email about the need to have 80% of the workforce at their work stations, in spite of the strike, went out at 15.57 hours , just ahead of the 16.00 hour (4pm) shift which, due to the strike, did not have anything like 80% of employees present.
The resulting delays in emergency response (seeing in some cases over 100 calls waiting to be attended) coincided with the worst day for deaths involving delays: a total of eight, including the 77-year-old man in Vila Nova de Cacela, who was discovered in the road, having fallen off his bicycle.
“My father was a healthy person”, Patrícia Martins tells CM. “If help had arrived on time, he would not have died”.
Patrícia Martins stresses that her father was lucid and conscious after his fall, “he knew what had happened” and he knew that his neighbours were trying to get help.
But in the time it took to finally reach INEM, João Martins lost consciousness.
An autopsy is taking place, but the family have also complained that there has not been “one word of comfort” from the authorities.
The situation has inflamed opposition politicians – all of whom see the government as having been negligent, even ‘cold’.
As for today, reports continue over ‘constraints’ at INEM, which the institute has stressed are not affecting the answering of emergency 112 calls. This in itself sounds a little hollow in as much as SIC Notícias explains the entire country’s IT system for CODU (Centres of Orientation for Urgent Patients) is ‘down’, leading to communications having to take place ‘manually’:
“Emergency medical vehicles continue to circulate, but calls for emergency response are being attended by mobile phones and occurrences are being registered manually”, says the news station.
