A high-profile court case has concluded in Barcelona involving the tragic story of an 87-year-old man who passed away in the autumn of 2022. The cause of death was a metastatic form of prostate cancer, first diagnosed back in 2003. The court found that the healthcare services of Catalonia (Institut Català de la Salut, ICS) failed to provide adequate monitoring of the patient’s condition following a relapse of the disease, leading to this unfortunate outcome.
The court ruling obliges ICS to pay the deceased man’s relatives compensation amounting to €74,718. The proceedings revealed that after the tumor reappeared in 2013, doctors stopped conducting regular checkups within just five years. Moreover, even when the man repeatedly visited emergency departments in the summer of 2022, complaining of severe pain, he was not given the necessary tests to detect possible cancer progression.
The family took the case to court, arguing that the doctors made a grave mistake by taking the patient off the oncology register too early and ceasing to monitor prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels as early as 2019. Representatives of the insurance company, defending the medical institution, claimed that further tests were unnecessary due to the man’s age and stable condition. However, the judge disagreed, noting that the patient remained active and repeatedly sought medical help for various reasons.
The court paid particular attention to the fact that, over several months in 2022, the man visited emergency departments five times due to worsening back pain, but doctors did not order any additional tests that could have detected the development of metastases. It was only in September, when his condition sharply deteriorated, that he underwent an MRI, which revealed extensive bone lesions and an extremely high PSA level. By that time, the disease was already at an advanced stage.
In the final ruling, the judge emphasized that no current medical guideline justifies discontinuing follow-up for a patient with a history of cancer, especially one who remains active and does not have other serious illnesses. The court concluded that ending supervision resulted in a lost chance for earlier detection of the recurrence and possibly some relief in the final weeks of life. The amount of compensation was halved compared to the family’s original request, as the court determined that the likelihood of a better outcome was diminished due to the late diagnosis.
