First complaints about the breast cancer diagnosis scandal in Andalusia
The Prosecutor's Office already has four lawsuits on the table and affected women are grouping together to prepare a joint one.
BarcelonaCommunication errors and delays in breast cancer screening in Andalusia are taking the form of complaints in various attempts to have the justice system clarify what went wrong and determine who is responsible. The Andalusian High Prosecutor's Office already has four complaints on the table and expects to receive others that have already been publicly announced in order to combine them and assess how to proceed, according to sources from the Public Prosecutor's Office told ARA. Two weeks ago, the The Andalusian government admitted errors in the diagnoses and estimated that there would be at least 2,000 affected. And the trickle of women continues. The scandal, which has already claimed the first political leader with the dismissal of the Minister of Health, Rocío Hernández, represents the biggest political crisis Juanma Moreno Bonilla has had to face since becoming president of Andalusia in 2019.
The four complaints filed so far with the Prosecutor's Office are signed by Adelante Andalucía, the Paci Ombudsman at the Torrecárdenas hospital. These complaints do not represent specific victims, but rather ask the Public Prosecutor's Office to investigate errors in screening. Andalusia's Chief Prosecutor, Ana Tárrago, stated this Wednesday that they are studying "each complaint" to clarify whether there is criminal liability and "if there are perpetrators of these acts."
The complaint being prepared by the Association of Women with Breast Cancer (AMAMA) will, however, represent women and specific cases. "I am gathering information; I have cases involving many women. More than a hundred, and it keeps growing," lawyer Manuel Jiménez Soto, who represents the association, told ARA.
Amama has publicly announced its intention to sue the Andalusian Health Service, which reports to the Andalusian Regional Government's Health Department, for delays in diagnostic testing. The seven volunteers working for the association, all of them breast cancer patients, are overwhelmed with answering the phones, explains Amama's secretary. Given the flood of affected women who have contacted them, the association is considering filing complaints "in batches" of approximately fifty women each, so as to expedite the process while their lawyer continues to review the cases that arrive.
"I'd like to think that in a week or ten days I'll be finished, but the cases keep coming in. When I think I'm finished, I have 30 new ones," admits Jiménez Soto. Her objectives are threefold: "First, to find out where the error is, because they don't want to say so. Second, to activate a plan to prevent it from happening again. And third, to compensate those affected." For now, she's considering filing a complaint against the regional government—"Since they haven't said who's responsible, I have to start there," she explains—with the aim of narrowing the investigation down to the regional ministry and its immediate supervisors.
For now, there are no complaints involving a person with special jurisdiction, such as a regional government official, according to sources at the Andalusian High Court of Justice. However, they indicate that it's impossible to recount the cases that have reached the ordinary courts because they may correspond to different cities and there's no common database.
Homicide Complaint
The Seville law firm Sires Abogados has also announced a complaint. This Wednesday, it filed a complaint for homicide against the Andalusian Health Service on behalf of the family of a man who died in July at the age of 86 after "he was not treated with due diligence by the Andalusian public health system, which lost key tests for monitoring the disease." The man, born in Garrucha (Almería), had been diagnosed in 2005 and underwent surgery in Madrid, where he lived. After retiring, he moved permanently to his hometown in 2011 and has been receiving treatment through the Andalusian health system ever since.
According to the family's complaint, the medical care he received included "serious omissions, as he was not given an adequate differential diagnosis despite having a clear history of cancer, and no oncology evaluation or multidisciplinary committee was requested, thus violating care protocols." The same lawyer representing the family, José Antonio Sires, has also publicly announced that he will file another complaint against the Andalusian Regional Government on behalf of the family of an 82-year-old woman who died in Seville, "which they hold responsible for a death that could have been avoided with proper management of screening for this disease."