Bar banter first clue to killings in hospital

Press, 12 April 1989, Page 13

Bar banter first clue to killings in hospital

NZPA-Reuter Vienna A chance remark in a * Vienna wine bar led to a : group of nurses in one of the city’s oldest hospitals confessing to killing nearly 50 elderly patients to relieve the victims’ suf- £ fering and lighten their r own workload. £ Austrian police have confirmed that a conver- £ sation between a doctor £ and a nurse at Vienna’s «Lainz Hospital over a * glass of wine alerted the ■a* doctor to what has been E described as the biggest « case of its kind in EuroS pean history. ■St Close observation of the S wards by worried doctors * revealed that the number of deaths in the internal ■if medicine clinic was al- * ways higher when certain

nurses were doing a night shift.

The police have so far detained four nurses who they say have confessed to killing 49 patients, all aged over 75, since 1983. They have not ruled out the possibility of further arrests.

The patients were killed by injecting them with overdoses of medicine, including insulin usually used to treat diabetes, or by forcing water into their lungs to suffocate them, police said. According to the police, the four nurses, aged between 27 and 50, said they started the killings originally out of pity for the suffering of elderly and terminally ill patients. But as they continued, some patients were killed

because they had become a nuisance, police said. They confirmed that a number of victims were not terminally ill and could have been cured. One of the accused said the nurses were chronically overworked, with two caring for 30 elderly patients. After initially praising the senior staff at Lainz Hospital for uncovering the killings, h senior police official has criticised doctors at the hospital for lack of vigilance.

The head of Vienna’s criminal division, Max Edelbacher, said he gained the “subjective impression that the doctors could have been more strict in their supervision.”