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J. A. G.
Malaga
Monday, 9 December 2024, 13:19
An eighty-year-old woman who 'came back to life' at a funeral home in Spain's Balearics Island after being declared 'dead' on Friday at the Joan March hospital in Bunyola (Palma de Mallorca) finally died on Sunday morning. The elderly woman, who was admitted to the hospital specialising in palliative care, originally 'died' late on Friday morning, according to the doctor on duty who certified her passing and signed the death certificate in error.
The body of the elderly woman was taken to a funeral home in Palma, but once there, as reported by the Balearic newspaper Ultima Hora, instead of putting her straight in a cold chamber, as they usually do, the workers took her out of the hearse and placed her in a room. However, when they were about to remove the sheets, they discovered that the fingers of the 'deceased' were moving. After the initial shock, the workers called 061, who sent an ambulance to the municipal facilities.
After the doctor checked that she had a pulse and that the woman was alive, an emergency transfer to hospital was ordered. The woman's state of health, very deteriorated and weak, could possibly have led to the medical error. In fact, police have ruled out any type of investigation, given that the facts were attributed to a human error.
However, the hospital has opened an internal investigation to determine what went wrong so that a doctor could certify the death of a patient who, in reality, was not dead. For the time being, it has announced that they will change the protocol to avoid a repetition of an episode like this.
When it was discovered that the elderly woman had come back to life in the Palma mortuary, the error was reported to the patient’s relatives, and they were given the option to transfer her to a different hospital. However, the family declined the offer and requested that she be returned to the same hospital. The elderly woman was readmitted to the palliative care centre in an extremely frail condition, where she finally died on Sunday.
Sources close to the Balearic Islands health service confirmed to the Mallorcan newspaper that this was a medical error that had never happened before in the Balearic Islands. "She presented a medical condition of extremely low blood pressure and did not respond to stimuli. That is to say, a Glasgow Coma Scale of level 3, which indicates that there is a very serious brain injury and a total absence of consciousness. For this reason, the doctor certified her death without performing an electrocardiogram or checking her central vital signs," the newspaper reported.
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