The early detection program of the Breast cancer has benefited millions of women in Andalusia Since it was launched in 1995 – which is currently active 1.3 million – and has never been clean … of suspicion about its ability to improve despite the substantial advance it has meant to reduce aggressive treatments and, above all, to its indisputable success for the lives it has saved.
The jurisprudence archive of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) It contains dozens of sentences issued in the last two decades that are pronounced about resources presented mostly by the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) to decisions of judicial instances of a lower order and that give the reason to the discontent cancer patients -or their relatives, in the event that they have died for a delay in the treatment.
The dysfunctions of the plan against chest tumors that activated the Junta de Andalucía in 1995 They are not, therefore, new, even if it is now when criticisms for the fact that 2,000 women with a doubtful diagnosis have not received precise information about the state of their illness.
Some of the cases in which the High Autonomous Court reasons are similar to those who have unleashed a health and political crisis in Andalusia since the beginning of this month. For example: G.’s family, a woman who was a tumor in the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville Since the late 1990s, he got a court of first instance to recognize compensation on account of the SAS worth 148,832 euros for a bad praxis that caused the death of women in 2007 for a metastatic carcinoma.
Interrupted monitoring
He Andalusian Health Service He resorted to the ruling and appealed to the TSJA, who gave the patient’s relatives again. The Superior Court of Justice argues in the sentence that “the expert affirms that it is contrary to normal protocols, after an oncological process, interrupting the follow -up for two years, in which period it is most likely that a disease was developed; which, according to this, constitutes a bad practice ».
And adds: «The report [del perito] He says that the April 2004 marker index was not very significant, which did not advise blind tests at that time; He also adds that the right thing would have been to repeat the analysis soon, which does not know that it would be done, on the contrary, because what results from the story is that there was no follow -up in two years ». In view, this case is even to those who are now in the first plane of today.
«The advance of
carcinoma
De Mama does not appear as the result of a unique medical act, but as a process composed of the succession of a plurality of acts spaced over time, ”says the TSJA
In the jurisprudence of Well There are numerous lawsuits with the same theme and outcome. In May 2016, this guarantee court had to rule on another appeal of the SAS because a court had condemned him to take care of the patrimonial responsibility for the damages suffered by an oncological patient of Sevilla For poor attention in public health, and in its resolution it emphasizes, precisely, in one of the issues that are being reviewed now, which is the monitoring of the tumor when its existence is not clear, but is probable, doubtful.
The TSJA says in his failure: «The advance of the carcinoma De Mama does not appear as the result of a unique medical act, but as a process composed of the succession of a plurality of acts spaced over time ».
At a row, it emphasizes «carelessness in the supervision of the periodic review process to which the appellant was subjected, after practicing a mammogram on December 14, 2007 which determined its classification in the category/suspicion code 3, which corresponds to women whose mammographic findings are probably benign, with a carcinoma probability of less than 2 percent ». These are specifically assumptions that have made the controversial stalle in Andalusia This October.
A 2016 judgment points out that there was negligence in a 2007 case due to lack of coordination between primary care and specialist consultation
The high court concludes that “although any lack of service is ultimately the explanation of defective care could be located in this case in an improper functioning of the review system, due to lack of coordination between the specialized service prescribing a periodic review and the step of the first assistance.”
This lack of coordination that the Well It stands out for the fact of 2007 on which it is pronounced in 2016 is still in force today: in fact, the Ministry of Health has now appointed, and after the criticisms of numerous patients, a coordinator of the program of the program screening of breast cancer in the SASthat he had never existed before, nor in each hospital, and that he will already be operational.
The legal principle on which most sentences on breast cancer treatment are based is the ‘loss of opportunity’, as indicated by the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia “It is specified that it is enough for a certain probability that the medical action could avoid the damage, although it does not want to affirm it with certainty, so that the compensation proceeds, not because of the totality of the damage suffered, but to recognize it in a figure that estimatesly take into account the loss of possibilities of healing that the patient suffered as a consequence of that late diagnosis of his disease.”
