Mediator case, resignation sensitive to the Compensation Office

Slam doors at Oniam, the body responsible for defining and paying compensation to victims of medical accidents! Magistrate Roger Beauvois has resigned. This man was in a sensitive position. He chaired the panel of experts responsible for examining compensation claims from Mediator victims (benfluorex, Servier). So far, only 152 opinions in favor of compensation have been issued by the National Medical Accident Compensation Office (Oniam) out of nearly 8,000 claims. And more than 990 refusals were notified because according to Erik Rance, the director of Oniam, these files relate to pathologies not attributable to the Mediator.

But for several months, the methodology of the committee to assess the compensation files filed by people with heart valve disease had been publicly contested. The committee made up of medical experts qualified in pulmonology, cardiology and bodily injury repair would have regularly reduced the level of severity of valve disease established in the echocardiographic reports of patients, most of the time without having available the video documents of origin… A practice which had outraged members of parliament and doctors. Thus, Prof. Jean-Luc Monin from CHU Henri-Mondor in Créteil (AP-HP), who chairs the echocardiography branch of the French Society of Cardiology (SFC), recalled that, to requalify an echocardiography, it was necessary to have the documents sources. The deputy PS of Haute Garonne, Gérard Bapt had regretted that “the doubt benefits (…) systematically to the laboratory and not to the patients”. And to drive the point home the deputy had estimated that “simple professional ethics would require the college of experts to resign collectively. “Moreover, these reinterpretations of medical imaging reports had also led one of the members of the panel of experts, the pulmonologist Philippe Hervé to resign in December 2012.” Most of the time, we had photocopies at best. of photos, ”he told reporters.

Faced with these criticisms, Roger Beauvois had remained straight in his boots. But his resignation this week revived the controversy. According to Oniam, Roger Beauvois “wished to leave his functions for personal reasons”. The magistrate was appointed president of the Monaco Court of Revision, the equivalent of the French Court of Cassation. His successor at Oniam is Alain Legoux, 67, magistrate at the Court of Cassation since 2002.