Over Death Certificate: PRC suspends license of Cebu hospitalowner

The Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) found Cebu Doctors Hospital chairman Dr. Potenciano Larrazabal Jr. guilty of dishonorable conduct and suspended his license for two years.

Rodolfo de Guzman, chairman of the PRC board of medicine, directed Larrazabal to surrender to the board his professional license and certificate of registration as a physician.

De Guzman also directed Larrazabal to desist from the practice of medicine under pain of criminal prosecution.

"This is very depressing, very disheartening. It's very painful for me," Larrazabal told The Freeman when asked to comment on the PRC decision.

The PRC said Larrazabal violated his oath when he signed the death certificate for one Emerita Ang-Yu on July 7, 1997 without even seeing her corpse.

Larrazabal said the law on the issuance of a death certificate does not impose stringent requirements nor does it require from the physician the application of his medical training.

He said mere knowledge of the death is sufficient and the death certificate can be issued without seeing or examining the cadaver.

However, the PRC board of medicine cited Presidential Decree 856 which provides that if there was a physician attending to the deceased, he should issue the death certificate.

In case there is none, the death certificate shall be issued by the mayor, the secretary of the municipal board or a councilor of the municipality where the death occurred.

The board said Larrazabal "did not fall under any of the persons enumerated by the law who shall issue the death certificate." Neither was he the attending physician of the deceased nor even had the chance to see the cadaver, it said.

Republic Act 3753 does not also authorize Larrazabal to issue a death certificate as such duty belongs to the local health authorities. And even if he was the attending physician of the deceased, he could not issue a death certificate, the board said.

Larrazabal is filing a motion for reconsideration within the week, according to his lawyer Cornelio Mercado, who said the penalty is too stiff.

Mercado said a punishment for dishonorable conduct is only applicable if a physician issued a false medical certificate.

Larrazabal said he issued the death certificate without malice upon the request of Jose Yu, the husband of the deceased, through his (Larrazabal's) son-in-law Neil Carcel, who is Yu's nephew.

Emerita died on July 7, 1997 in her residence at Ma. Luisa Village. Larrazabal stated in the death certificate that she died of cardiac arrest, although with a question mark since such circumstance is attendant to all deaths and to show uncertainty on the exact cause of Ang-Yu's death.

Since Ang-Yu's relatives had doubts as to the cause of her death, they exhumed her body and asked forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun to examine it. It was concluded that she did not die from cardiac arrest but asphyxia through manual strangulation.

But Larrazabal said he was just a victim of a "crossfire" between two feuding families - the Angs and the Yus. He declined to elaborate.