After the death of the young woman, two investigations were opened, one by the Montpellier public prosecutor’s office, the other by the ARS Occitanie.
The case is reminiscent of that of Naomi Musenga. The tragedy, which occurred on October 15, was made official last Friday via a press release from the Montpellier University Hospital. It is revealed there, as reported Free Middaythe “sudden death” of a 25-year-old patient. The one who was a lawyer, employed by the City of Montpellier, died following a devastating acute meningitis. But the victim’s relatives are now denouncing a dysfunction in the center responsible for regulating emergency calls. The young woman had in fact contacted emergency services several times. His parents have also filed a complaint for involuntary homicide.
“My best friend, my confidante was abandoned by those who are supposed to protect us, despite my repeated calls to the 15th and 18th, no doctor, neither from Smur nor from Sdis 34, no ambulance for several hours “, deplores the victim’s friend, who ultimately herself took the young woman to the emergency room, to our colleagues atActu.fr.
“I see everything white, my body is on fire, I’m going to die”
According to this friend’s account, on October 15, the victim contacted her to come and give her help when she was feeling at her worst. Vomiting, high fever, fainting, “stools with blood-red liquid”, legs that no longer move and even a completely rigid right hand, the symptoms are worrying, but the young woman’s friend claims that her repeated calls to the 15, then 18 remained in vain.
Worse still, the operators’ response even ended up becoming contemptuous. “She said to him: ‘My hand hurts, I can’t feel it anymore’. And he replied: ‘You can’t have your hand hurt and not feel it anymore’ […] He told her: ‘You’re going to run your hand under hot water and take a hot shower and you’ll be fine,'” she recalled on the microphone of BFMTV this Monday. And to criticize: “They have the right to be wrong, but there was enormous contempt and enormous judgment.”
Faced with the Samu’s refusal to send a team, the friend said she was forced to call a transported relative to help her. The two of them then carried the young woman into the car before heading towards the hospital. On the way, the victim would then have felt his end approaching, repeating in a loop, as relayed The Parisian : “I see everything white, my body is on fire, I’m going to die.” After having lost consciousness before her arrival at the emergency room of the Saint-Roch polyclinic, the young woman, subsequently transferred to the Montpellier University Hospital, finally died “two hours after her admission”, affirmed Monday morning the deputy public prosecutor of Montpellier, Marco Scuccimarra, to our colleagues.
Two investigations opened, the assistant regulator of the Samu suspended
The Montpellier public prosecutor’s office has since opened an investigation, as has the Occitanie Regional Health Agency (ARS). The deputy prosecutor specifies Parisian that at this stage, the qualification of involuntary homicide has not been retained. This in fact assumes that “a causal link must be demonstrated between possible faults in care and the death”.
For its part, the hospital center indicates, in its press release, that “the details of the tragedy are still unclear”, but that the CHU intends to “provide in complete transparency the details necessary to understand the exact circumstances of the death of this young patient ” to his loved ones and that he “will collaborate with the greatest transparency with all the authorities”.
As relayed by BFMTV, the assistant regulator of the Samu has, for his part, been suspended. At the microphone of the continuous news channel, Louis Soulat, vice-president of Samu Emergencies de France, affirms that “from the start, there was medical regulation and there was a proposal, that is to say – to say the request of a general practitioner at home which was not possible Then, the regulator seems to have fallen back on a consultation to which the patient had to travel. Pointing out that “medical regulation is a very difficult act, which is done over the telephone”, Louis Soulat also made a point of emphasizing that “in the present case, these are relatively frequent symptoms during this time of the year”, without to minimize the facts.