Podcast ”Inside Charité”: ”Medically unacceptable”: 16-year-old cancer patient apparently goes without medical care for days

The Berlin Charité has a brilliant reputation. Now research shows star and RTL a different picture: organizational deficiencies, overworked doctors and mistakes that endanger people.

Episode 3 inside charité

Sophie is 16 years old. She sits in an armchair in front of a large wall of windows in her hospital room at the Berlin Charité. She took off her headscarf. Her mother tilts the window to ventilate, the wind is blowing outside. On the table in front of Sophie lies Prince Harry’s biography ”Reserve”, a thick tome. The German version has 512 pages. This is the sort of thing you read when you have tons of time. Or like Sophie here: an involuntary amount of time.

Sophie is a pediatric oncology patient at the Charité. She has cancer. And yet she is not in the children’s cancer ward, but in the children’s cystic fibrosis ward. In itself, it is not unusual for children to be moved to other wards when they are full, for example. But this case is special because the undercover material star-Reporter suggests:

No doctor in sight?

Sophie’s mother says that no doctor has come to look after Sophie for days. She is desperate. “Medically unacceptable,” says the doctor and expert Dr. Bernd Hontschik described the situation as that star-Investigative reporters Manka Heise and Christian Esser talk to him about Sophie’s case. ”It’s not possible at all to put oncological pediatric patients together with normal patients. This merger alone is a high risk. They need a special approach to their risk of infection. Some even have to be isolated and, and, and,” says Hontschik.

You can hear more about Sophie’s case and what Berlin politicians say about the conditions in the Charité in the third and final episode of the investigative podcast ”Inside Charité”.

You can listen to the first and second episodes here.

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