They were both foreign women… Prymula appeared on CT. Trouble on Bulovka. Who made a mistake?

As a former director of two hospitals, Prymula was asked to comment on how such a fundamental mistake could have occurred that a blood sample taken by a patient resulted in an abortion procedure: “I have to say that I will speculate a little. Official conclusions as to why this happened are not yet available. Bulovka is undoubtedly a hospital that has standards of care such that this cannot happen. It is an accredited hospital, so clearly there must have been some human error. As it happens, that human error does not come alone, there must have been several of those mistakes, surely several people must have made a mistake,” introduced Roman Prymula to the confusion of patients at the Bulovka Faculty Hospital.

“In general, this is the biggest fear of medical professionals: to avoid mistakes, that they confuse, for example, the operated organ, limb, etc. Of course, primarily I have to operate on the right patient. If you are building the reputation of your hospital, it is an extremely complex matter, and one thing like this can spoil the reputation for decades to come,” continued the ex-minister of health in the ČT24 Interview program.

When asked how the patients could have been confused, he mainly mentioned the language barrier during the medical procedure: “It’s definitely a mistake by the doctors. The unfortunate coincidence is that there were two foreign women, both of whom were not well equipped with the language, communication is more complicated, and therefore the verification should have been different,” he said, adding that the doctors should have placed great emphasis on the verification of the patients and the purpose of their visit.

“Historically, we didn’t have nearly as many foreigners here as we do now, and it is necessary that the language communication is definitely on a different level,” he added, adding that a translator should always be available so that the patient knows about everything informed in a language they understand.

According to Prymula, is it a radical step to consider dismissing the director of the relevant health facility due to confusion and damage to the patient’s health? “It has to be based on some reality, not just one reality that has come to the surface. That mistake can really happen, it’s a tragic mistake, but that doesn’t mean that the director has to be dismissed directly. But if it turns out that it was a systemic error, that the patient’s identity is not checked, then this is really a matter that should be addressed and should have an impact on the highest levels of the hospital,” says the doctor.

According to Prymula, the Ministry of Health, as the founder of the Bulovka University Hospital, is not the right body to investigate what really happened.

A subsequent topic was the rise of whooping cough. There are currently 5,297 cases in the Czech Republic. “What was surprising was the sheer scale of the epidemic. At this point it is clear that we will be above the numbers that were there sixty years ago. In essence, it can be said that from the parameters that are available here at the moment, we will probably reach over ten thousand.

It will stop when the population has enough immunity. It turns out that there is a large area in some age groups where the immunity is not ideal. It is a category of 15 to 19 years old, they are adolescents who were vaccinated only after 2007. This is the limit when we still used the whole-cell vaccine, since then the vaccine is apparently not as immunogenic as we need it to be,” added epidemiologist Roman Prymula .

“However, where we are very worried is the category of infants, here there is a real risk that someone will die, it has already happened in the surrounding countries,” he said and advised parents to isolate the newborn as much as possible in the first months, until it can be vaccinated. He recommended that family members also get vaccinated.

According to him, vaccination of pregnant women is much more effective. “We can vaccinate them in the third trimester. This is something that is not widely used in the Czech Republic. We have a vaccination rate of 1.5 percent of pregnant women,” Dr. Prymula said, adding that in Western countries, almost 80 percent of pregnant women are vaccinated. “This is probably the main problem, when we need to do much more education than we do,” added the epidemiologist.