The 62-year-old woman, who received a wrong blood transfusion while being treated at the Neurology Clinic and suffered hemolysis and is fighting to keep herself alive, remains in a serious condition in the Intensive Care Unit of the Tzanio Hospital for the 20th day.
The haematoma, which was caused in her brain due to a different type of blood unit being administered incorrectly, has spread, and as her hospitalisation at the MED is prolonged, the odds are not on her side.
At the same time, in the hands of the family of the 62-year-old patient is the detailed finding of the Health Care Quality Management Agency on the criminal errors and omissions that led a mild neurological case to this condition.
The finding focuses on eight areas where mistakes were made, including a breach of protocol for blood transfusions, as well as damage to medical equipment.
As revealed by protothema.gr, a broken printer, miscommunication between nurses, and the absence of qualified, protocol-based staff at the time of the transfusion brought a woman to the point of groaning. And all this in one of Attica’s largest hospitals in 2025…
When transfusing blood into a patient, protocol calls for the procedure to be supervised by a doctor or nurse, not just a nursing assistant, as was the case with the 62-year-old woman.
“The finding says the whole system’s bugs. Not even the protocols were followed. The transfusion should have been done in the presence of a doctor or a nurse. The protocol says at least a Secondary Education nurse”, says to protothema.gr, the lawyer of the 62-year-old woman’s family, Mr. Athanasios Alexopoulos.
The second mistake has to do with the patients’ wristbands, which the nurses did not put on any of the patients in the ward, as the printer had broken down, so they could not print them. This is confused with both the identity of the patients and their hospitalization information.
“The printer on the floor was not working, so they could not print the wristbands and distribute them to the patients. Neither the 62-year-old woman had a wristband nor any other patient on the ward. Other than that, they were numbered by bed number within the ward, but they did not determine or communicate with each other. Left to right or right to left? And that’s how the confusion happened,” says the family’s lawyer.
The finding, meanwhile, shows that the criminal negligence against the 62-year-old woman was not a “mistake” of the moment, but had begun hours before the fatal transfusion.
According to reports, there were two bags for the blood donation, and the first was administered to the correct patient by another nurse at 6.15 pm on Tuesday.
Shortly after 1 am on Wednesday, however, the 30-year-old nurse’s assistant, who is accused of the medical error, entered the ward and gave the 62-year-old woman the second bag of blood, which was intended for the first patient.
Finally, the finding states that after the wrong transfusion, the 62-year-old remained in the ward unattended for 45 minutes. Then, a patient session who was in the room realized the woman was collapsing and alerted the nursing staff.
“At 45 minutes, another patient’s attendant alerted that the woman was not well. He initially alerted the nurse so that the doctors could come immediately. Of course, all these defects mentioned in the finding had been identified by November 2024,” Alexopoulos stresses.
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