“I Was over nine months out, but I went back to class. The burns were very painful, but with patience and soothing I came out ahead. It never has turned out to be the same after the operation is the intimate life with my partner. Neither the surgery nor the psychological therapy they have managed to recover our sexual activity”.
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up Carlos, master of elementary education 63-year-old who asks to remain anonymous, the episode that has marked his life since 2014, when an operation in the hospital of Fuenlabrada caused severe burns to the genitals which, among other sequelae, you have caused a shortening and an abnormal curvature of the penis.
A small tumor in the bladder, which turned out to be benign, led Carlos to the operating room the 3 of September of that year. The operation had to be a little invasive. The scalpels electric are currently in use to allow access by the urethra and into the tissues to be removed, they are subjected to currents of high frequency. But on this occasion, “a transfer inadequate energy” caused “burn through the urethra came up to the skin ventral to the penis”, according to a judgment of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM).
The cause of the damage was a problem in the resector of the electric scalpel, the part of the instrumentation that is inserted through the urethra. According to Olympus, the manufacturer of the device, the piece “is a single use, and the hospital failed to comply with the lex artis” to re-use the piece in more than one patient. Lex artis is the set of technical rules that has to conform to the action of a professional in the exercise of his art or trade, according to the legal dictionary of the RAE.
The center, in a brief written contribution to the inquiry, admits this fact: “The Service of Urology has been the usual practice [of] to examine the integrity of the handles and to replace them in case of default. The number of uses is not precisable, since the conditions of use are not always superimposable and its resistance to wear, very variable”.
A spokesman for the hospital now explains that the health centre “has taken all measures to review the protocols and procedures to prevent this type of adverse side effects, inherent to medical practice, will happen again”.
After leaving the operating room, the doctors explained to the family of Charles that “the operation had gone well, but that’s a problem, there had been a small burn the size of a coin of one or two cents, you expected her to have good performance,” recalls affected.
complications, however, were getting worse as the days went by. The burn grew “to more than four or five centimeters,” Carlos stopped to urinate in a natural way, required “cures constants” and “after six months of evolution, complex and very limiting,” he was subjected to a second operation, according to the ruling. The objective of this intervention was to undertake “a reconstruction of the penis and urethra”. In total, Carlos had to carry “for nine months a urinary catheter and a collection bag of urine.”
All this, according to the lawsuit, has caused serious physical and psychological consequences to the patient: “Has an obvious anatomical alterations and aesthetic, with shortening and incurvación penile very significant as a result of the injury and the reconstructive surgery. It affects the sexual relationships, less satisfying for him and his partner, stating in addition to medication to keep them”, summarizes the text with the details of these and other consequences of the intervention.
in view of the severity of the damage, the ministry of Health of the Community of Madrid agreed to in 2017 to compensate Carlos with 138.081,82 euros and your partner, with a further 6,000. Health assumed the responsibility of heritage considering that the injuries were a direct result of the deficient health care provided to Charles.
The family appealed to the to consider that Health assessed under-some damage and ignored others. “The department quantified the damages according to the schedule used by insurance companies in road traffic accidents”, explains the lawyer of the family, Victoria Blázquez. “This is something usual, but in cases such as this do not properly value the magnitude of the psychological sequelae, among other consequences,” he adds.
The Section 10th of the Contentious-Administrative of the TSJM has dismissed the claims of the family, who demanded to increase the compensation up to 327.000 euros. The court considers, however, that the amount fixed by the Community of Madrid is set to the right.
Second sentence to the hospital Rey Juan Carlos of Móstoles
The hospital Rey Juan Carlos of Móstoles has been convicted by the high Court of Justice of Madrid to pay € 350,000 to a patient who suffered serious burns in the urinary tract during a procedure of prostate gland also with an electric scalpel.
It’s the second sentence that receives the center for this reason, after a court forced the beginning of the year to compensate another person with € 121,000. The two affected are part of the group of five patients that at the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013 were severely damaged by the malfunction of the scalpel, from the brand Olympus, one of whose pilots was activated to alert of the failure.
In this case, company and hospital blame each other in court for what happened. Olympus claims that the centre made a poor use of the equipment, while the hospital believes that the machine has a factory defect. The court, however, believes that the center is ultimately responsible for the damage.
