Sergio Gallardo Ramos filed around 100 denuncias (complaints) against personnel at the public health care provider following the death of his 15-year-old son Roberto in January 2010 at the IMSS Pediatric Hospital in Guadalajara. All were thrown out until last week when a federal judge ruled in his favor and issued arrest warrants for 16 IMSS doctors on charges of involuntary manslaughter.
The doctors have made their declarations and had their fingerprints taken at the Third District Court while their lawyers this week filed injunctions (amparos) that will keep them out of jail.
Gallardo Ramos accepts that it is unlikely that any of the doctors will serve prison time, but says he would like to see them stripped of their medical licenses.
Roberto was admitted to the pediatric unit of the IMSS hospital in November 2009 after being diagnosed with an acute asthmatic crisis. At first, doctors believed that he had contracted the H1NI flu but that diagnosis was quickly discarded. As Roberto’s condition worsened, he was placed in intensive care, where over the next 16 days he underwent seven abdominal surgeries.
In later accusations, Gallardo Ramos said that during one of the operations medical staff inserted a catheter incorrectly, perforating his son’s lungs. In another operation, it was claimed, they perforated the boy’s intestine, causing severe hemorrhaging. When Roberto died after 55 days in hospital, doctors signed off on his cause of death as an “infection.”Pathologists carrying out an independent autopsy at the Servicio Médico Forense ruled that Roberto died from intestinal tuberculosis, an identifiable and curable illness.
Roberto’s father said in statements to the court that tissue samples taken from his son’s intestine that would have permitted a correct diagnosis of his condition were never analyzed in the hospital’s laboratory.
Gallardo Ramos said his four-year fight for justice has been “draining” and marked by many legal setbacks, mostly because he faced “a very powerful institution” with “many economic resources.”
Explaining the motivation for his struggle, Gallardo Ramos said, “What I wanted to do was to set precedents, so that patients can receive dignified treatments, of quality and warmth.”
A previous review by the National Medical Arbitration Commission (Conamed) ruled that Roberto’s death was a result of “poor medical practices,” but did not acknowledge that hospital staff had been negligent.
Nationwide concern
The ruling has caused consternation within the medical community, both in Jalisco and rest of the country.
The Consejo Medico Nacional de Derechos Humanos published an open letter this week repudiating the legal system’s treatment of the doctors as criminals, noting that “when a doctor is found guilty of negligence, he not only loses his job and license but his life as well.”
Another publication circulating on social media questioned the circumstances of Roberto’s death, his physical condition at the moment he was admitted to the hospital, as well as the quality of his parents’ care. Noting that the boy was obese, suffering from hypertension and diabetes, the publication wondered why, given that Roberto had been asthmatic since the age of four, his parents had decided to varnish the interior of their house before his admission to hospital. It also pointed out that before he passed away, Roberto suffered from asphyxia that causes generalized hypoxia, a condition that primarily affects the tissues and organs, specifically the intestine.
A social media group called #YoSoy17, created in support of the doctors, has planned a march in Guadalajara on June 22 that will go from the IMSS Centro Medico de Occidente to the offices of the federal Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República). Many staff from the Jalisco Pediatric Hospital will take part.
The federal judge’s decision means the IMSS is liable to pay damages to the family of the deceased. Backers of the accused doctors have inferred that Gallardo Ramos was eyeing up the possibility of financial compensation even while his son was receiving treatment in hospital, pointing to photographs that he took of the boy while he was in intensive care.
In separate news this week, the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH) announced that it receives more complaints about the IMSS than any other institution in the country.
Each year the commission fields approximately 1,800 complaints regarding malpractice, negligence and other oversights committed by personnel employed by the public health care provider.