In Luxembourg, more than 1,000 patients are affected by the recall of equipment manufactured by Dutch health-technology provider Philips. The devices in question are considered defective due to the sound-absorbing foam that they contain, which degrades into potentially harmful particles when inhaled by patients.
As we reported in November, patients were only belatedly informed that their respirators, particularly those used to combat sleep apnoea, needed to be replaced.
To this day, many patients are still waiting for this replacement, confirmed head of the Health Directorate Dr Jean-Claude Schmit in an interview with RTL on Wednesday morning. However, precise figures are not available.
Dr Schmit explained: “The Directorate is not aware of all the patients using these devices, only of the wholesalers who import them and possibly also bigger clients, such as hospitals or others, who buy them. It is the manufacturer’s responsibility to inform the latter. The whole recall operation is extremely slow and that is regrettable, but it is not only slow in Luxembourg, it is slow throughout the world. It’s a global problem and the company that produces these devices just can’t keep up with replacing them.”
In November, Philips said that the goal was to replace 90% of faulty respirators worldwide by the end of 2022. Neither Philips nor the company that sold the devices in Luxembourg were able to tell us how many of these devices are, or were, in use in the Grand Duchy.
The National Health Fund (CNS) is similarly unaware of the exact number of people that are affected. The majority of devices seem to have been distributed by the Centre Hospitalier du Nord (CHdN), 1,024 in total. In the meantime, only one third of patients have received a new respirator, according to the CHdN.
