University Hospital Transfuses Type A Blood to Type O Patient; Prosecutors Request Reinves­tigation After Police Decline to Forward Case

[Financial News] Police initially declined to forward a case involving medical staff at a university hospital who transfused a patient with the wrong blood type after misidentifying her blood type. Prosecutors have since requested a reinvestigation.
According to police and legal sources on the 16th, Seongbuk Police Station decided on the 14th of last month not to forward a case involving medical staff at a university hospital in Seoul who were accused in 2024 of professional negligence resulting in death. The Seoul Northern District Prosecutors' Office, which received the case, requested a reinvestigation on the 21st of the same month.
The incident occurred in September 2024, when a woman in her 50s, identified as Ms. A, was taken to the hospital’s emergency room in cardiac arrest. Medical staff checked her blood type for an emergency transfusion but mistakenly identified her as type A. Her actual blood type was O.
The investigation found that an error occurred while staff were checking patient-specific blood barcodes. Type A blood was mistakenly transfused into Ms. A, whose condition subsequently deteriorated, and she died about a month later. Her family filed a complaint against the medical staff and others on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in death.
Police reportedly determined that there had been problems in the emergency-room nurses’ blood-verification process. However, they concluded that it would be difficult to establish criminal negligence sufficient to apply the charge of professional negligence resulting in death. They are said to have considered the circumstances as a whole, including the shortage of medical personnel during a resident doctors’ strike, the influx of emergency patients, and Ms. A’s critical condition, which included cardiac arrest and a pulmonary embolism.
Prosecutors said they could not disclose the specific reasons for requesting the reinvestigation. However, they reportedly determined that the facts needed to be examined further and supplemented before a final decision was made, prompting them to request the reinvestigation.
[email protected] Seo Ji-yoon Reporter