85-year-old Chinese woman wakes up after being declared dead

The first-aid doctor was suspended for mistakenly declaring the woman dead after she cut her wrist in a suicide attempt but came to life during a forensic check.

The women gradually opened her eyes and gently moved her shaking hands when a forensic doctor was photographing her body, about 30 minutes after the first-aid doctor declared her dead and police cordoned off the apartment on Wednesday, her relatives said.

The woman is now stable after her shocked relatives and neighbours called the medical emergency hotline again and rushed her to a hospital, the Shanghai Daily reported.

Pudong Medical Emergency Centre officials apologised to the family yesterday and said the incident was caused by the first-aid doctor's "improper rescue efforts."

The doctor has been suspended, Tang Zhihong, vice director of the centre, said.

Tang said the centre got the first call for help on Wednesday from the woman's daughter who found her mother lying in blood in an apartment on Jinkou Road in Pudong.

Tang said the first-aid doctor checked the woman's vital signs and declared her dead after reading results from an electrocardiogram machine.

Police later arrived and asked the forensic doctor to check the body, when the woman awoke.

"Although first-aid doctors are all trained and required to give first-aid treatments to patients even when the machine shows they are dead, the doctor didn't make proper rescue efforts and left," Tang said.

Regulations require doctors to carry out rescue efforts for at least 30 minutes, and then stop only when the patient's family asks them to stop, he added.

The woman's daughter, surnamed Bian, said she begged the doctor to give one more try to save her mother, but he didn't act after a straight line was shown on the machine.