Elderly patients died one after another in a short time in hospital rooms that had no working air conditioners. This clearly is an abnormal situation.
From Aug. 26 to 28, five inpatients in their 80s died at Y&M Fujikake Daiichi Hospital in Gifu city. The five are suspected to have died of heatstroke.
Air conditioners on the floors where the patients were staying broke down on Aug. 20. After that, a fan designed for household use was placed in each of the affected rooms.
Y&M Fujikake Daiichi Hospital accepts elderly patients requiring long-term treatment. The hospital had about 50 inpatients at the time. It means that about 10 percent of them died in quick succession.
The Gifu prefectural police became aware of the situation after being alerted by a person connected to the hospital. The following day, police searched the hospital on suspicion of murder, although no suspect had been identified.
Awareness that this was an urgent situation apparently prompted the police to swiftly conduct a compulsory search. It is said that the prefectural police are considering building a case based on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in death.
The hospital has denied there was any causal connection between the air conditioners breaking down and the deaths. It insisted there "was no problem in how we handled the matter," but the hospital also attempted to move some patients to another building after the air conditioners failed. This suggests the hospital was aware of the danger of keeping patients in rooms with no air-conditioning.
Gifu had been sweltering through some scorching weather during this period. Temperatures in the city reached highs of 30 C to 36 C each day, and the temperature did not drop much over several nights. One person who visited a patient in a room at the hospital said, "The heat put me in a daze."
Thorough investigation needed
Four of the five patients stayed in rooms without working air conditioners until they died. The hospital's director said, "Some patients say they prefer hot rooms." Can the bereaved families really be convinced by this explanation?
The hospital deemed the five died of illnesses such as heart failure, so it did not report any of the deaths to the police. The prefectural police are investigating the precise cause of death through legal autopsies.
Couldn't hospital staff have noticed earlier that something was wrong, such as when taking the patients' temperature while on their rounds? Weren't there problems in the hospital's management of the temperature, humidity and other conditions in the patients' rooms? An exhaustive investigation of these issues is needed.
Elderly people generally find it harder to feel heat, while their ability to control their body temperature also declines. They must be very careful to avoid heatstroke. This is even more the case for patients staying at a hospital because they have an illness. It goes without saying that the hospital specializing in medical care for the elderly needed to give meticulous consideration to its patients.
It is believed that the hospital should have taken steps such as temporarily transferring the patients to nearby medical institutions until the air conditioner repairs were completed. The city's public health center was quite right to demand the hospital stop accepting new patients for the time being.
The late summer heat likely will continue for a while. Following this incident in Gifu, medical institutions across the nation should once again check whether their steps for preventing heatstroke among patients are appropriate.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug. 31, 2018)
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