Hospital São Francisco Xavier in second drama this week
The family of an 87-year-old woman ‘discharged from hospital’ only to arrive home dead are demanding answers from the same busy Lisbon hospital that is under investigation for ‘losing track’ of a patient whose badly decomposed body was discovered in undergrowth close by earlier by this week.
The common denominator in both cases appears to be that both patients were suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
In this latest case, Hercília de Salles Novo had entered the hospital’s A&E department the day before, suffering fever and vomiting.
For reasons that will now be being fully established, she was cleared for discharge the next day, and picked up by firefighters performing passenger transport to take to her family’s home, roughly three kilometers away.
From what the family appear to have gathered, their elderly relative was “not very reactive” when she was collected.
Granddaughter Rafaela Pereira told Correio da Manhã tabloid that one of the firefighters realised she was not reacting to stimuli on the short journey, and asked his colleague (who was driving) to stop.
According to the account, the colleague simply repeated the instructions of the hospital: the elderly lady was to be left at home.
And so it was, an hour and 20 minutes later (a timeline the family is also querying) that the ambulance arrived at their home, with their grandmother “already ice cold, with purple lips and fingers”.
Rafaela Pereira told CM she believes her grandmother had been dead “for some time”.
Bottom line: the family want answers, and feel their loved one was not really afforded the best of care.
Rafaela highlights the fact that the elderly woman was transported ‘sitting up’, when she had been bedridden for some time. The young woman also told the paper that the doctor who signed her grandmother’s discharge papers had said she should never have entered A&E “to occupy the place of someone who had more need of it”.
An official source for São Francisco Xavier has been quoted as telling the paper that an initial analysis of the situation does not flag “any inadequate situation from the point of view of clinical actions”, albeit the hospital will now open an ‘internal inquiry to evaluate existing information and decisions taken by way of hospital assistance’.
The hospital is already undertaking an internal inquiry into how it lost track of Alzheimer’s patient Avelina Ferreira, whose body was discovered two months later in scrubland nearby – as are public prosecutors.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
