Six employees of the Saint Pantelimon Hospital in Bucharest have been indicted in the case opened following a series of deaths that began in 2023.
According to the prosecutors, the medical staff deliberately reduced the doses of medication delivered through infusion pumps and the amount of oxygen administered to intensive care patients to hasten their deaths.
As reported by Euronews Romania, the six, of whom four are intensive care doctors and two are nurses, believed that the patients had little chance of survival.
The charges brought against them include attempted aggravated murder, attempting to induce the commission of a crime, perjury, intellectual forgery, and instigation to intellectual forgery, according to the prosecutors’ statement.
The method allegedly used by those nurses and medical professionals involved reducing the oxygen supplied by specialized equipment, as well as reducing the noradrenaline, a substance that, in intensive care, should keep patients’ heart rates within normal parameters. This decision was made to bring patients to a critical point and then free up beds in the anesthesia and intensive care unit. In this way, at least four patients were allegedly killed.
Prosecutors also concluded that when patients suffered cardiorespiratory arrest, medical staff deliberately “allowed death to occur,” despite having the ability to resuscitate the patient.
The six acted within the anesthesia and intensive care unit and were investigated for almost two years after the last death, which occurred in April 2024. At the time, the doctors recorded unrealistic information about the treatment administered to patients in their medical files. The investigation also involved retrieving digital data stored on medical devices, forensic medical examinations, an exhumation, as well as home and computer searches, according to prosecutors.
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