And if you're holding off and are unlucky, the robber wakes up before Tuomo and kills him... It probably applies to the situation where you want to stop Toumo from bleeding out, where I suspect the game may either apply the remedy to the enemy (I've never tried to do that, so I don't know if it's possible) or claim that the enemy can't be healed as he's an enemy/not bleeding.
A related (but far less dire) situation is when hauling logs with a cow. When zooming in to a map tile, the dog and the cow both occupy the tile directly to the east of my character, and it's sort of random whether the dog's or the cow's inventory is the one that's available (no, you can't push the log onto the dog. It's too heavy, or: the dog isn't carrying anything). an also happen when traveling with companions.
It's possible to work around the issue by shifting around so there's only a single critter in the tile in the hauling case, of course.