Jernej Golc

Sonja Golc died at the age of 49 in the UKC Maribor, 7.12.2022. We spent half of our lives together as life companions, with two daughters, a joint business, and active in various NGOs, in our last years we managed a 19-ha farm on a steep terrain, and we were happy. We were together 24 hours every day, making decisions, creating ideas, motivating and animating each other, in short, living life to the full. Suddenly, overnight, everything changed and Sonja went into what I called a fantasy world, turning me, at the age of 49, into a living corpse in the real world. After her death, I had to face up to the fact that she had died not of natural causes, but of a number of medical incidents during her hospitalization. I have decided to create the Sonia Golc Memorial Wall, where I am also publishing the content of my research and truth-finding about the last two months of her life, which is linked to various procedures and will gradually be made publicly available, with the aim and objective of perhaps helping someone else not to go down the same path as Sonia did in the last months of her life.
More at: https://sonjagolc.substack.com/

As the first victim, I have to face the fact that Sonja died as a result of several medical incidents. Unfortunately, in our country, Slovenia, we do not have a proper legislative system in place to disclose medical incidents, and the safety culture in healthcare institutions is at a very low level. So I had to go through various torturous procedures to prove that there were several mistakes in my wife's treatment. She had gallstones and several different medical incidents in the hospital procedures resulted in the death of the patient.

In Slovenia, the Patients Rights Act does not protect the first victims of medical incidents, but it protects the second victims, the medical staff, and the third victims, the medical organizations which in cases such as mine cover up these medical incidents and do not disclose them to the relatives, and also do not take any measures to further prevent such medical incidents and similar medical incidents.

That is why I have decided and have set up the Sonja Golc Memorial Wall on which I am publicizing the procedures and findings and the beautiful memories of our short life. Then patients from different parts of Slovenia started to contact me with similar tragic stories. This is how we went on to found the Initiative of Relatives of Victims of Alleged Medical Errors, and in the future we want to transform it into the Patients for Patient Safety of Slovenia.