A physician has been found guilty of negligent homicide after a seven-year-old boy with a throat infection died because he refused to treat him as an urgent case.
Paediatrician Ashraf S., 61, of District Hospital Freiberg in Saxony, Germany, went on trial after little Jeremy died from glandular fever in 2017.
The Egyptian native was found guilty on 3rd February of medical omission that led to the boy’s death five years ago.
Local media said Manuel Truebenbach, 44, of Olbernhau, Erzgebirgskreis, rushed his son to the hospital because he was unable to breathe from a swollen throat.
He then spent days by his son’s bedside as Jeremy’s throat slowly closed, telling local media: “He was afraid of suffocating.”
Manuel said doctors gave him oxygen but refused to do an arterial blood gas (ABG) test, which was reportedly the only way to determine if the treatment was working.
Realising his condition was worsening, Manuel and his wife Sandra then urged hospital officials to transfer Jeremy to the paediatric ICU of University Hospital Dresden.
Sandra, 39, said: “I thought we did everything right when we went to the hospital at the time.”
The transfer was eventually approved, but Jeremy died in the ICU five days later.
The couple spent years collecting evidence before deciding to file a lawsuit against the physician in autumn 2022.
At the final court hearing, Ashraf S. justified his actions by claiming the boy had “been better in the meantime”, which is why he did not do an ABG test.
He claimed they tried to treat the child “conservatively” in order to “spare him [from pain] as much as possible”.
The court found Ashraf S. guilty of not taking appropriate medical measures and failing to supply the boy with a tube to aid his breathing.
He had also failed to transfer the boy to the paediatric intensive care unit in time.
The was fined 100 daily instalments of EUR 150 (GBP 130), totalling EUR 15,000 (GBP 13,000). A colleague named Jarmila D., 63 – also on trial – was acquitted.
Following the verdict, Manuel and Sandra said: “We want to draw attention to grievances in clinics so that other parents don’t have to go through something like this.”
The verdict is not yet final.
