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An unprecedented incident occurred in which a hospital inpatient was killed by another patient, and the hospital falsified the cause of death, stating that the person died of an illness. What happened at that medical facility? Many details need to be clarified.
The incident took place in 2023 at a hospital in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, where an inpatient was murdered after being repeatedly stabbed in the face with a toothbrush handle by a man hospitalized in the same room.
In February of this year, the police arrested the person who had been director of the hospital at the time of the incident and the attending doctor of the murdered patient for allegedly concealing the culprit by falsifying the cause of death of the victim.
The director and the doctor, who are brothers, allegedly provided the family of the deceased patient with a false death certificate stating that he died of pneumonia, despite knowing that there had been a murder at the hospital. The incident came to light after a hospital employee reported it to the police following the patient’s death.
A death certificate is issued to medically and legally certify a person’s death. It is unacceptable to record a false cause of death on the document. Why did the hospital do this? The police must expedite the investigation to determine the motive.
The death certificate in question is believed to have been written at the instruction of the director by a male doctor who was also an inpatient at the hospital. It was said that due to suffering strong symptoms of dementia, the hospitalized doctor was unable to engage in conversation and had a tendency to write pneumonia as the cause of death whenever he was given a death certificate.
A large number of death certificates signed by the hospitalized doctor were found in the facility. Many of the documents had pneumonia written as the cause of death. If the director and others regularly compiled false death certificates by using the hospitalized doctor, that would violate medical ethics.
The man who committed the murder was arrested in 2023 and sentenced to 17 years in prison. “I could not bear being tied to the bed, and I thought that if I killed someone, I could leave the hospital,” he was quoted as saying in court. Did the director cover up the murder case for fear that the actual conditions inside the hospital would be exposed?
Following the arrest of the director and the attending doctor, the Aomori prefectural government and the Hachinohe municipal government finally started a full-scale probe into the hospital. Why did they not investigate the hospital two years ago, when the murder took place? It must be said that they lacked awareness of how serious the problem was.
The hospital has accepted many psychiatric patients and elderly people who need to recuperate. Incidents of nurses assaulting patients have occurred at the former Takiyama Hospital in Hachioji, Tokyo, which accepted psychiatric patients in the same way as the Hachinohe hospital in question.
These hospitals are often referred to as the “last bastion” for accepting patients who are difficult to treat in general hospitals or at home.
Is there any possibility that checks by the local governments have become lax for fear of disrupting the regional medical service system? From now on, steps should be taken to make it easier for outside observers to keep an eye on the situation, such as by introducing unannounced inspections.
