The Ministry of Health has been sentenced to compensate 50,000 euros to a patient who suffered secondary damage after two back operations ten years ago, the Patient Ombudsman Association reported this Monday when making public the ruling of the Valencian Superior Court of Justice.
In the ruling, dated the 6th, the TSJCV partially upheld the patient’s claim and it states that the resident of San Vicente del Raspeig, 26 years old and with diverse medical history, was subjected to had back surgery in 2014 with screw fixation, without first being informed of the risks and complications to which she was exposed.
Immediately afterwards he began to suffer episodes of paralysis in his legs, loss of strength and urinary incontinence, and after a new operation it was found that two of the screws were broken.
“It is striking that the patient was also not informed about the possible risks and consequences of this last intervention in which the vertebral fixation and screws were removed. Due to all these facts, the patient has since suffered pain that makes her unable to develop her work activity and family life with total normality”.
The affected person went to El Defensor del Paciente, which referred her case to the specialist lawyer Ignacio Martínez, and “now the ruling agrees with her”, although according to the entity, the entity criticizes the compensation for insufficient compensation for the seriousness of the consequences.
The lawsuit maintains that the initial surgical intervention “was not duly informed to the patient and such reproach must be adjudged, for obvious reasons related to the distribution of the burden of proof, since the file does not include such surgical intervention (nor the removal of the fixation) and the risks linked to it,” the ruling adds.
The president of the aforementioned association, Carmen Flores, has denounced the “very poor amount recognized” by the TSJCV, “in its usual line”, since there has been “damage that has incapacitated a young woman for life to develop her professional activity and carry out out a normal family life.
The patient, he added, “is happy that it is declared that she suffered medical negligence, but considers the compensation completely insufficient.”
