The Assistance publique-Hopitaux de Paris (AP-HP) will be tried before the criminal court for involuntary manslaughter, following the death in 2018 of a patient in the emergency room, AFP learned on Wednesday from a source close to the case.
In his referral order to the criminal court, issued on Wednesday and consulted by AFP, the investigating judge concluded that "a serious fault of negligence excluded any possibility of survival" for Micheline Myrtil: the fifty-year-old dropped off at the Lariboisiere emergency room by the firefighters on December 17, 2018 at the end of the afternoon was found dead the next day on a stretcher, without having been examined by a doctor.
The investigating magistrate did not follow the requests of the Paris public prosecutor's office, which had requested on July 3 a dismissal of the case, considering that "the causal link between possible deficiencies in hospital care" and "the death had not been established."
One of the AP-HP lawyers, Mario Stasi, did not wish to comment.
Suffering from headaches and calf pain, Micheline Myrtil, born in Martinique in 1963, was taken to the Lariboisiere emergency room by the firefighters, then taken in and directed to a waiting room.
Called around midnight under a false identity ("Myatil" instead of "Myrtil"), the patient never answered and was then considered to have left. She was in reality on a stretcher, "unattended" between 1:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., the time she was found dead.
According to the judge, the "gross negligence obviously lies in the fact of having taken medical care of Mrs. Myrtil in the emergency department at around 7 p.m. and not having been concerned with the development of her condition for more than 5 hours."
"Before," he continued, "calling her in vain to the general public under a false identity on two occasions, without further seeking to locate her when she was necessarily on her stretcher in the corner of the short circuit where he had been positioned, with her bracelet on her wrist, and leaving her there all night, without anyone worrying about it."
An initial autopsy report established that the patient died of "acute respiratory failure secondary to pulmonary edema."
After the death, Lariboisiere announced increased patient screening measures in emergency rooms. The regional health agency (ARS) also issued various recommendations, including an increase in staffing.
English 
French