The Injury Lawyer Directory Blog

A woman who died in May 2004, three hours after giving birth to her son, because a nurse attached the bag of anesthetic for her epidural to a line going to her arm rather than to her back, was the victim of "gross negligent manslaughter" according to an inquest recently concluded on the tragedy. The finding was that the wrongful death was due not only to the mistake in attaching the bag, but in the failure to properly check it, which the husband said could have been done at any of six different opportunities, but was not. The nurse testified that she thought she had connected either saline or a blood volume expander to boost the woman's blood pressure. Not only is the nurse liable for her criminal medical malpractice, but the hospital as well, which admitted to a chaotic storage of drugs that may have led to the pharmaceutical error. Similar but non-fatal misconnections occurred at the hospital in 1994 and 2001.

If you have lost someone you love as a result of a delivery room error in Chicago, contact experienced medical malpractice lawyer Barry G. Doyle at the Law Offices of Barry G. Doyle, P.C. for a free initial consultation.

Labels: hospital misconduct, medical malpractice, wrongful death

The Federal Government accepted a $750,000 settlement in the medical malpractice case of a woman who died after receiving eight surgeries at the Jacksonville Naval Hospital in just over a month in 2005. In the wrongful death suit, the woman's family accused the Navy of doctor error and failure to transfer her to another facility. The woman arrived at the hospital complaining of stomach pain, then died of a blood infection.

This is only the latest case to be settled at the facility with one of the highest per capita malpractice rates of any hospital in the country. This case follows over $70 million in payouts from the hospital in 2005 for a half-dozen cases, including several wrongful deaths, and precedes five more pending malpractice cases against the military hospital.

If you or someone you love has suffered as a result of the substandard care at this or any other US government institution, contact Fuller & Fuller, a family of lawyers with years of experience.

Labels: hospital misconduct, medical malpractice, military, wrongful death

A Cook County jury has awarded the largest ever medical malpractice verdict for the wrongful death of a woman to the family of a 34-year-old woman who died in 2003 from complications at a Chicago-area hospital, St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. The jury awarded $22 million dollars in support of the claim by the woman's family the woman suffered a massive brain hemorrhage as a result of the staff's negligence in improperly treating her high blood pressure during labor. The woman was placed on a ventilator and died four days later. The baby was delivered by Caesarean section and survived, fortunately without birth injury.

According to arguments by their attorney, the condition could have been controlled with proper medication, and the failure resulted from hospital personnel's failure to follow their own procedures. The finding was against the hospital and the doctor. The hospital, refusing to acknowledge responsibility, said it would pursue an appeal.

If you have lost someone you love as a result of the negligence of the staff at a Chicago-area hospital, contact experienced medical malpractice attorney Barry G. Doyle at the Law Offices of Barry G. Doyle, P.C.

Labels: chicago, hospital misconduct, medical malpractice, medical negligence

A Boston, MA jury awarded $2.5 million in damages to a woman who was told she had the HIV virus, then underwent treatment for almost nine years before learning she never contracted the virus. As a result of the potent cocktail of dangerous drugs she took to kill the virus she never had, the woman suffered numerous side effects, including depression, fatigue, loss of weight and appetite, and inflamed intestines, all of which no doubt confirmed the AIDS hypothesis in the minds of doctors and nurses. However, what makes this case of medical malpractice so grievous and why the punitive amount in this case is far too small, is that the misdiagnosis was made on purely anecdotal evidence, and never once, during almost nine years of treatment, was the women given definitive tests to confirm the presence of HIV.

The doctor claims that the woman said she had worked as a prostitute, that her partner had AIDS, and that she had suffered three bouts of a type of pneumonia commonly found in AIDS sufferers. In addition, the woman had elevated counts of immuno-response cells in her bloodstream. The woman denies she was a prostitute, does admit that a former boyfriend tested positive for HIV/AIDS, and it seems unlikely that the woman said she had suffered bouts of Pneumocystis pneumonia.

But none of this is particularly important, since even if a woman was a prostitute and had bouts of Pneumocystis pneumonia, somewhere in nine years of treatment, a definitive test should have administered. Even if doctors wanted to begin the treatment immediately to aggressively combat the virus, when blood monitoring began and showed no presence of the virus, someone should have taken Othello's advice and said, "Be sure of it ; give me the ocular proof." Not to administer the test is a gross example of medical negligence.

Although doctors often have to make judgment calls where evidence is incomplete and action must be taken immediately to save a life, whenever possible, medicine should fall back on its basis, which is science, not art. Doctors should not turn a lifestyle or a social background or an ethnicity into a diagnosis, and when they do this, they should be severely penalized for their medical malpractice. If you have gone to a doctor and received treatment based not on medicine, but on the doctor's personal biases about your race, sex, or lifestyle, contact the experienced medical malpractice attorney, Barry G. Doyle, in Chicago, for a consultation.

Labels: hospital misconduct, medical malpractice, medical negligence, misdiagnosis