Nine years cut to five and a half: the trained cook who was the Iris care home's 'doctor' in Bratislava, three deaths, and the final verdict of June 2025

Slovakia's Iris case is one of the clearest European examples of what happens when nobody checks a "doctor's" credentials. At a private centre for seniors in Bratislava, the man residents and families knew as the physician was a trained cook, and the woman they knew as the nurse had been hired to clean.

According to Pravda, reporting on 25 August 2023, Judge Branislav Harabin of the Bratislava I City Court found that Ivan Bihary and Vanessa Pútiková had posed as a doctor and a nurse at the Iris centre from 2016 until 3 July 2018, when police intervened at the home and detained them. Without any professional qualification they decided which medicines residents received; Pravda reported that some clients were given morphine, tramadol or Xanax, and that raised drug levels were found after bodies were exhumed. Prosecutor Peter Pilár said three people died as a result of the pair's actions or inaction. Bihary, who presented himself to clients as a palliative doctor and a psychiatrist, had no diploma and no medical training. The court imposed an aggregate nine-year prison term and a five-year ban on nursing and healthcare work, and also convicted him of endangering others with HIV by concealing his infection. Pútiková, who had admitted her role in October 2019 and said Bihary decided on medication although he was not a doctor, received a three-year sentence suspended for five years.

Pravda also reported that the judge said investigators may have known of the activity as early as March 2018 and would examine whether police could have intervened sooner. The verdict was appealed. TA3, citing TASR, reported on 19 June 2025 that an appeal panel of the Bratislava Regional Court cut Bihary's sentence from nine years to five and a half, finding him guilty of harming health while acquitting him on the HIV count because tests had not detected virus levels capable of transmission. The five-year ban on nursing, care and similar work stands, and the appeal judgment is final.

The mechanism was simple. A care home let an employee with no credentials act as its physician for about two years, families took the title at face value because they saw him handing out medicines, and, by the trial judge's account, the authorities may have had the information months before they acted.

The lesson for families is that a care home's "doctor" must be checked like any other: ask for the full name, look it up in the national medical register, and ask which registered provider the home contracts for medical care. For anyone tempted to "help" with medication without a qualification, the Iris case shows where it ends: a conviction, a prison term, and deaths on the record.