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MADRID – Last March, as the coronavirus tore Spain apart, Lídia Bayona Gómez began to suffer from vomiting and coughing.
A retirement home worker, she treated herself as a potential case of Covid-19, isolating herself and getting tested. The results came back negative, twice. With her weight decreasing and her urine turning red, she made several attempts to see a doctor and at the end of April, during a telephone consultation, one of them told her to stay home and told her to prescribed medication for gastroenteritis and urinary tract infection.
But the pain kept getting worse and at the end of June, her sister took her to an emergency hospital. In mid-July, she underwent 12-hour surgery to remove two cancerous tumors, one from an ovary and the other from the bile ducts. She died in hospital nine days later, aged 53.
It was not an isolated tragedy.
Hospitals and other health care centers have been forced to devote most of their resources to patients with Covid-19, and doctors warn growing numbers of cancer and other serious illnesses go undetected , which could end up costing many more lives. This record is starting to be reflected in the lawsuits.
Details of Ms Bayona Gómez’s care are part of a lawsuit brought by her sister, Fátima Bayona, which wants Spanish prosecutors to charge local health officials in the northern city of Burgos with gross negligence. Last month, prosecutors said they would investigate the death.
Several other lawsuits were filed just in Burgos, including one by a woman who learned she had terminal cancer after trying for seven months to get to a hospital for tests.
Carmen Flores, president of an association that helps patients or their loved ones take legal action, said her association has helped bring more than 50 lawsuits since September, when Spain and other countries were hit. by a second wave of Covid-19. She said her workload was increasing exponentially due to medical errors and errors resulting from doctors’ attention to Covid-19 at the expense of other illnesses.
Unlike some other countries, the Spanish government does not report the number of medical lawsuits filed each year. But Ms Flores said that, judging by her monitoring of filings in courtrooms across the country, the number appears to have increased so far this year by at least 30%.
Some lawsuits accuse doctors of refusing to see patients in person. But others say doctors rushed to the wrong conclusions or didn’t want to risk touching patients as part of their exams due to the risk of catching Covid-19.
For the most part, however, doctors say they are just overworked.
Doctors in many countries have warned that the pandemic may have exacerbated other health problems, either through the diversion of resources or because, especially in its early stages, people were afraid to seek help for d ‘other conditions.
Britain’s main body for physicians, the British Medical Association, said hospitals in that country received more than 250,000 fewer than normal urgent cancer consultation requests in April, May and June. A survey of cancer patients in the United States released in April found that nearly one in four reported delays in their care due to the pandemic.
But Spanish doctors say the crisis has exposed particular weaknesses in the country’s healthcare system.
“In Spain, we have long been proud to have become the best in the world in specialties like transplants, but this pandemic now also makes us realize how much we have neglected our primary health care”, declared César Carballo , doctor in the emergency unit of Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid.
“We have had thousands of our professionals who have gone to work overseas, and we really need to make it more attractive for them to work here again.”
The staff shortage has been of particular concern in places like Madrid. The leader of the capital region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has built a new hospital. But she is struggling to find health professionals to work there at a time when health unions are forcefully voicing their discontent.
Last month, Spanish doctors staged a nationwide strike to protest their working conditions and to warn authorities against hiring additional doctors without adequate qualifications.
“It will cost us a lot of time, money and effort to rebuild the foundations of our healthcare system,” said Dr. Carballo. “You can’t find new doctors in a few months.”
Ms Flores, of the association that helps patients take legal action, echoed those concerns.
“This virus is at least hopefully giving us the message that primary health care cannot continue to function properly when staff and investments have been steadily reduced,” she said.
In another case of undetected cancer, Lydia Sainz-Maza Zorrilla, radio journalist, chronicled her sister Sonia’s last months. She was 48 when she died in August from colon cancer after failing for three months to see a doctor in person. Instead, she received bad advice over the phone from her local health center.
“Our public administration has used Covid as a perfect excuse to keep doctors on the phone and completely eliminate the possibility that they can properly diagnose patients,” Ms. Sainz-Maza Zorrilla said.
“If her doctor had actually seen and touched her, I’m absolutely sure my sister would be alive today because colon cancer is terrible, but you don’t have to die of it like she has. done, ”she added.
Last month, Verónica Casado, the regional health minister, told a press conference that she was sorry “if there was something that had not been done well” in terms of the treatment of Mrs. Sainz-Maza Zorrilla. On October 6, prosecutors opened an investigation into his death from colon cancer.
As doctors and nurses face the second wave of Covid-19 with better protective gear than in the spring, their morale appears to be lower.
“I just can’t give a patient adequate attention when I recently had to see 100 people in one day,” said Patricia Estevan, a doctor at a public health center in Madrid.
Manuel Franco, professor and epidemiological researcher at the University of Alcalá de Henares and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, said: “We have healthcare workers who are now not only exhausted but also angry because ‘They have seen some improvement in the protocols since last spring, but not the hiring of more people that was promised. “
Yet some of the recent lawsuits also highlight the danger for patients who end up receiving treatment in a hospital overwhelmed by the influx of Covid-19 patients.
Jesús Pinos is suing a hospital in the city of Santander, in the north of the country, after the death of his grandmother, María Delia Laguatasig Iza, who had to wait by mistake for her appendicitis operation in a hallway full of patients Covid-19.
Although she tested negative for the coronavirus before her surgery, she was diagnosed with Covid-19 a week later, eventually dying.
The hospital did not respond to a request for comment. Santander prosecutors opened their own investigation on October 26.
“She has been the victim of disastrous medical errors that one would never expect in a modern and functioning health care system,” said Pinos. “What is clear is that she entered the hospital without Covid, was discharged home with a cough, and ultimately died from this virus.”
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