Patti's leg splinted with cardboard: the judge agrees with the doctor

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The judicial case that arose around the national news story of the leg “splinted” with packing cardboard in the emergency room of the “Barone Romeo” hospital ended with the annulment of the disciplinary sanction and the condemnation of the Provincial Health Authority of Messina to pay the legal costs.

This was established by the labor judge of the Patti court, Fabio Licata, with a sentence rendered at the end of a proceeding that began in 2025, after Dr. Maria Giovanna Barbitta, medical director of the emergency room, had been punished by the company with a disciplinary sanction (200 euro fine) precisely for having carried out that makeshift splint.
The professional, assisted by lawyers. Giovanni Tortora and Tindaro Giusto, had challenged that act before the labor judge, denouncing serious procedural defects.
With the sentence signed by judge Licata, the Patti court fully accepted the doctor’s appeal. Barbitta, canceling the sanctioning measure, as the disciplinary process followed by the Asp would have been fundamentally flawed.

Two, in particular, are the pillars on which the judge’s decision was based: the violation of the right of defense and the lack of access to the documents (“defence in the dark”). Despite repeated requests for access made by the defence, the judge found that the ASP never made the minutes and final reports of the inspection commissions available to the doctor. The company would then use those same reports to justify the sanction in court. A conduct which, according to the judge, would violate the employee’s right to know the investigative documents in order to be able to concretely defend himself.

Furthermore, the ASP would have initially accused the doctor of negligent conduct, from which damage would have resulted, while in the final provision the sanction would have been inflicted on the basis of a different rule, which generally punishes the violation of the duties of diligence (regardless of the damage), changing “on the fly” the legal and factual assumptions of the accusation to justify the punishment.

Having established the illegitimacy of the proceedings due to the lack of the worker’s guarantee and defense requirements, the judge therefore annulled the fine of 200 euros and condemned the ASP of Messina to reimburse the costs of the litigation in favor of the doctor. Barbitta.

The story dates back to the night between 27 and 28 July 2024, when a young man from San Piero Patti arrived at the emergency room of the Patte hospital under green code with a trauma to his lower left limb. Having noted the absence of disposable kits for orthopedic immobilization, Dr. Barbitta proceeded to perform an emergency immobilization using sterile cardboard. The photo of that “splint”, published on social media by the boy’s father, quickly went around the web, becoming viral and triggering a media storm.
In the wake of the public outcry, the ASP of Messina promptly launched an internal inspection, followed by a regional one and additional checks by the NAS of Catania. While the Company has repeatedly claimed that suitable aids were actually available in the hospital, the doctor always reiterated the lack of them during that night shift.

«Although this is the first degree of judgment, today – is the comment of the lawyer. Tortora – a judge certifies what this defense has asserted since the origins of this affair: our client acted as a scapegoat and they wanted to hastily charge her with responsibility for the sole purpose of covering up organizational problems within the healthcare company, for which she certainly cannot answer. As the judge himself recognized, Dr. Barbitta was forced to face disciplinary proceedings without us ever being provided with the relevant reports or all the relevant documentation.”