When Renate B. was sitting in the waiting room in the hospital, she heard the sentence from a doctor that probably all relatives of patients are most afraid of: "We are now turning off the devices." Renate B.'s husband The tragedy started with a bicycle accident the day before, August 14, 2018. The pensioner fell on a dirt road and fell with his neck on the handlebars.
Because of a swelling in his neck, he was examined and treated in two hospitals the day after the accident, first in the district hospital in Bad Homburg, later in the hospital in Frankfurt-Höchst.
The investigation in the district hospital in Bad Homburg has been a case for the Frankfurt Regional Court since Wednesday.
Jan Schiefenhövel
Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The public prosecutor sees the doctors responsible for the death of the pensioner.
The fault, according to the prosecution, was that the patient was discharged home after the examination.
Instead, he should have been admitted to the hospital to monitor his condition in intensive care, as prosecutor Wanja Welke stated at the beginning of the main hearing.
This would have prevented his death "with a probability bordering on certainty".
The bruise on the neck caused blood to run into the tissue, so much that the windpipe was displaced.
The narrowing of the airways eventually led to death.
That is, the patient suffocated.
The doctors in Bad Homburg overlooked this danger, as the prosecutor says.
"Not a case for a surgeon"
That is why a doctor has to answer for negligent homicide before a large criminal chamber of the regional court. The law provides for a fine or imprisonment of up to five years for this. The now 35-year-old assistant doctor Katja K. was then on duty doctor in the emergency room of the district hospital. In August 2018 she was still at the beginning of her professional career, in the eighth month of specialist training in surgery and orthopedics. According to her, she noticed the swelling on her neck and ordered a computer tomography, but the contrast agent was forgotten. The neck injury was a case for an ear, nose and throat doctor, not a surgeon, she says in the courtroom.
An ear, nose and throat doctor is the second defendant, 59-year-old Martin T., who is not an employed doctor at the hospital, but runs his own practice on the clinic premises and treats hospital patients as an attending doctor.
In his own words, he also noticed the swelling on his neck.
During an endoscopic examination he saw a bruise on the mucous membrane in the throat, but the entrance to the trachea was clear.
Therefore, the admission to the hospital was not necessary.
The discharge came as a surprise for the patient's wife and daughter, they report.
In the following hours at home, he first coughed violently and then turned blue.
An emergency doctor was then called who took the patient to the Höchst Hospital, where he eventually died.