A court in Valencia is investigating whether a 60-year-old woman died at the Hospital Universitari La Fe in April 2022 due to a possible medication overdose after having undergone a heart transplant from which she was recovering correctly.
The case originated with a complaint from the family of the deceased, in December of last year, in which they warned that a nurse from La Fe had committed an alleged crime of homicide due to serious professional negligence by giving the patient an overdose of a medicine.
The woman underwent a heart transplant in February 2022 due to symptoms consistent with a heart attack. The operation was a success and a few days later she was transferred to the cardiovascular surgery hospitalization ward to continue her recovery.
At a certain time, as indicated in the complaint in relation to a medical report, the patient was prescribed a medication, an antiviral that is used for the prevention of CMV infection – a type of herpes virus – and was also prescription if you have received a solid organ transplant from a donor infected with this virus.
In the month of March, an “unidentified” nurse, “erroneously” – always according to the complaint – administered the medication to the woman. The medical report stated that the dose administered was 60% higher than that corresponding to the patient and that in the event of an overdose the woman could present multiple organ failure, “in addition to being administered intravenously, when it should have been by orally,” the document maintains.
That same day it was decided to admit the woman to Resuscitation and the change of service report included: “Reason for admission: 60-year-old female patient – 46 days post heart transplant -, admitted from the hospitalization ward due to acute respiratory failure. in context with mistaken administration of oral medication intravenously”. After that, the patient died on April 2.
In the same complaint, it is regretted that the medical history of the deceased does not include the identification of the nurse “who made the mistake” or the doctor who prescribed the medication, nor has any investigation been opened. “That is to say, there is no evidence that anyone has done anything to find out why a young 60-year-old woman died because of a very serious mistake,” she warns.
This procedure was provisionally archived by the court but the family of the deceased appealed to the Court, a body that, in June 2023, after studying the documentation, decided to revoke the lower court resolution and order the continuation of the case.
The Prosecutor’s Office also requested that the family’s appeal be considered in view of its content and the medical report provided, appreciating that there were indications of the possible commission of, at least, a crime of reckless injury, for which it requested the practice of the appropriate procedures to identify the person who wrongly administered the drug, as can be seen from the Court’s resolution.
