Shock in Romania as doctors took medical devices from corpses and fit them to patients
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The doctors are being investigated in Romania after they operated on several heart patients and allegedly fitted stents taken from deceased people.
Searches are being carried out in the counties of Brașov, Iasi and Neamț. The investigators also visited the Regina Maria Military Hospital in Brașov and the Emergency Hospital “Sfântul Spiridon” in Iasi
More than 170 patients would have received stents, pacemakers and defibrillators from deceased people, the cardiac devices being settled by the National Health Insurance House by entering false codes, according to judicial sources cited by TVR.
Romanian prosecutors said on Saturday they have opened a criminal investigation into five doctors suspected of reusing hundreds of medical implants extracted from dead patients.
One of the five doctors, who was working at a hospital in the eastern Romanian city of Iasi, has been taken into custody pending the investigation on charges of abuse of power and bribe taking, prosecutors said in a statement.
They said the unnamed doctor oversaw a network of four other physicians who provided him with cardiac implants extracted from deceased patients without prior approval from them or their families.
Prosecutors allege the doctor performed 238 surgeries over seven years from 2017, illegally using implants extracted from dead patients or of unknown provenance and putting his patients at risk of serious complications or death.
“A large part of the implants recommended by the doctor … were not necessary and were prompted by fake diagnoses or by previously prescribed medication that would trigger specific symptoms,” the statement said.
Romania’s healthcare system, one of the least developed within the European Union, has been dogged by corruption, inefficiencies and politicised management.
The state has built one hospital in the last three decades, spends the least on healthcare in the EU and tens of thousands of doctors and nurses have emigrated.
