After the death of a twelve-year-old in Detmold, a doctor and two nurses have to answer to the district court for negligent homicide. The public prosecutor accuses them of not having worked carefully when treating the girl suffering from diarrhea and fever in December 2019 at the Detmold Clinic. The young patient died after one night of dehydration. At the beginning of the trial on Wednesday, among other things, the doctor commented on the allegations.
When the girl was taken to the hospital by ambulance, she had been ill for several days and had stopped drinking. In the hospital, the accused 49-year-old doctor diagnosed a mild gastrointestinal infection. Over the course of the night, the patient then received too little liquid and was not monitored enough, according to the indictment. The two co-accused nurses, both 66 years old, could have recognized the bad condition of the child at the beginning of the service and had to contact a doctor, it said.
Only when the parents sounded the alarm the next morning did the specialist in pediatrics, who was trained in Syria and in Germany, notice that the girl only had a weak pulse and her lips were already slightly blue, he said. He had the child taken to the intensive care unit. According to an expert report, however, it was too late for resuscitation at that point.
The doctor, who came to Germany in 2014 and only worked a few months at the Detmold Clinic, reported that there is always a lot to do in the children’s emergency room. In the case of the girl, he correctly assessed the condition when she was admitted and took the necessary steps. It was only in the morning when he was called to see the patient when he was handed over from the night shift to the early shift.
However, one of the accused nurses testified that the doctor could not initially be reached. Also, not all findings were available at the time of handover. The death of the twelve-year-old “hurts her soul” and she blames herself every day. The trial will continue on September 1st and 15th.
