Italy jails doctors from 'clinic of horrors'
Eight Italian doctors from a "clinic of horrors" have been sent to prison for performing over 80 unnecessary operations for financial gain.
Published: 5:08PM BST 29 Oct 2010
The exterior of the Santa Rita Clinic in downtown Milan Photo: AP
The head surgeon at Milan's Santa Rita clinic, Pier Paolo Brega Massone, was sentenced to 15 and a half years in prison for overseeing surgery such as breast and lung removal, Italy's La Repubblica newspaper reports. Prosecutors had asked for a 21-year sentence for Pier Paolo Brega Massone after his trial had heard how surgeons had performed unnecessary operations on 86 patients in order to receive greater reimbursements from the health service.
Massone was accused of "causing pain through unnecessary surgery" on terminally ill patients at the practice in Milan, which has been dubbed the "clinic of horrors", with the sole aim of "financial and professional gain". The investigation began in 2007 following an anonymous tip-off. Wiretaps caught doctors talking openly about greater income from more invasive surgery. One patient was given a mastectomy for a minor breast ailment while another with pneumonia had part of a lung removed.
According to prosecutors, at least five mostly elderly patients died after operations that were too risky for their condition. The charges against the doctors ranged from voluntary homicide with the aggravating circumstances of cruelty, to social security fraud in 2005 and 2006 estimated at 2.5 million euros (£2.2 million). Massone's assistants, Pietro Fabio Presicci and Marco Pansera, were sentenced to ten years and six years, nine months respectively. Five other doctors were sentenced from three years to one and a half years.
Only the anaesthetist was acquitted. "I'm the scapegoat," Massone said to his lawyer in court when the sentence was read out. Massone, Presicci and Pansera will have to pay between 50,000 and 80,000 euros each in compensatory damages to the 40 patients who brought the civil action and 90,000 euros to the region and the Italian health service. Of the 14 people arrested in June 2008, five negotiated plea bargains, including the head of the clinic Francesco Paolo Pipitone, a notary in his seventies.
