ER Doctors Prefer Not to Visit Elderly Patient to Save Some Gas

The investigation of the death of a 64-year-old pensioner, a resident of a village in the Kurgan region of Russia, revealed monstrous reasons, which resulted in such a tragic outcome, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote.

Photo: ER Doctors Prefer Not to Visit Elderly Patient to Save Some Gas

The man’s wife called the ambulance when her husband said that he was feeling very bad. The operator said that the ambulance was not going to arrive until they received a conformation call from the village physician. The physician was away from the village at that time. The woman had to spend the whole night sitting by the phone and calling the ambulance in the regional center over and over again, begging them to come and help her husband. The ambulance never arrived , and the elderly man died .

The man, identified as Nikolai Golovin, died on August 17. Prosecutors said a month later that medics were partially guilty of the man’s death.

“The dispatching point of the regional hospital was indeed receiving many calls with a request to send the ambulance to the village of Kamyshnoye, where the couple lives. The hospital refused to serve the call because they had not received a call from the village physician, who was on vacation at that time. The man died the next morning,” an investigator said.

The above-mentioned village is situated 25 kilometers from the district center. It would have taken the doctors less than 25 minutes to get there. The head physician of the regional hospital refused to comment the situation, and only asked not to judge the doctors before the investigation is finished.

“There is a paragraph in the hospital regulations which says that ER doctors do not visit stroke patients older than 80 if hospitalization and transportation is forbidden for them,” prosecutor Vasily Grigoryev said.

The pensioner was 64.

“Pensioners may often call the ambulance reporting unimportant problems. We have to send ER vehicles to them, but there is always the petrol issue. That is why they ask local physicians to confirm if the call is really necessary,” one of the medics said.