GP refused plea to help dying girl

A DOCTOR who refused to attend at the bedside of a dying girl has been given a 10-month suspended jail sentence and ordered to pay €10,000 damages to the family.

Five-year-old Lyna was in the terminal stages of cancer and had been allowed home from hospital in January 2011 to be allowed to die with her family around her.

Hospital doctors had said she should have medical assistance at least once a day to ensure that she would die in peace. But the Orleans locum GP assigned to her would not travel the 25km to her home in Coulmiers when the family called him out.

Retired GP Paul L, who was 75 at the time, would only give telephone advice to the family and merely told them to give Lyna paracetemol.

Medical experts told prosecutors the girl, who had been battling cancer for two years, should have been given morphine or oxygen therapy to ease her suffering. She died in hospital three days later.

In court the girl’s parents denounced the GP’s “inhuman” treatment of Lyna in prescribing only paracetemol. Their lawyer told the now 79-year-old Paul L: “You failed in your duty as a doctor but also in your duty as a man.”

Judges imposed the 10-month suspended jail sentence for “non-assistance à personne en danger” – not helping someone in danger and in addition to the €10,000 damages order he was also fined €5,000.