Increased alert and surveillance are in place at Brotzu Hospital following a maniac's incursion into the Cardiology department in the early hours of Saturday. The man, who is not employed by the facility and is being tracked by police officers, is said to have first sexually assaulted a healthcare worker and then groped a bedridden patient while making obscene gestures.
It all began shortly after 6:00 a.m. A healthcare assistant working in the "turret," a separate room used by staff for shift changes, was approached by the stranger. Under the pretense of asking for information, the man began making unwelcome comments. Frightened, the worker locked herself inside the room, while the attacker insistently knocked, apparently even breaking the front door in an attempt to gain entry.
The woman managed to contact a nurse on duty in the women's ward. "The nurse," says FIALS provincial secretary Paolo Cugliara, who collected the workers' testimonies, "immediately rushed outside to help her colleague, who had also suffered minor injuries from a fall in the hallway while running, and managed to escort her safely back into the ward."
Here, the two women came face-to-face with the harasser. The man feigned indifference, claiming he was there to visit his mother, before disappearing by taking one of the internal elevators.
But it doesn't end there: "A few moments later, the call bell rang from a patient's bed," Cugliara says, "the woman reported, shocked, that she had just been the victim of a very serious sexual assault by the same man."
The intruder, according to the story, approached her bed, touched her private parts with an excuse (he was apparently wearing a doctor's coat) and uttered vulgar phrases, then performed acts of autoeroticism in front of her before running away.
The call to the security service was immediate. While the Flying Squad investigates the case, the hospital has increased its surveillance of the wards. But this episode "leaves a deep trail of fear among the healthcare workers, who are deeply affected by the incident," Cugliara says, "and forcefully reopens the issue of screening and security in Cagliari's hospitals. A detailed report on the events has been filed to demand clear answers about how an outsider was able to circulate undisturbed in the patient areas and in the staff rooms during the height of the night shift."
Brotzu's general manager, Maurizio Marcias, said that "the company contacted the police immediately after the incident. An internal audit was also initiated."