Jury exceeds state cap in infant head-trauma case
In what’s being called the state’s largest medical malpractice judgment to date, a Nebraska jury has handed down a multimillion-dollar award to a couple whose daughter was improperly discharged from the hospital after suffering a fall-related seizure, a story in the Omaha World-Herald reports.
The fall occurred in 2017 at a day care center, where then 11-month-old Vivianne Marousek hit her head while playing and began experiencing a seizure. Taken to an Omaha hospital, the infant was first treated by an emergency department doctor and then placed in the care of a hospital pediatrician. (The ED doctor wasn’t a party to the subsequent suit.)
According to the plaintiffs, after examining and observing the child, the pediatrician concluded that her seizures wouldn’t persist and that she should be discharged from the hospital. Within 48 hours after returning home, however, Vivianne suffered severe seizures, resulting in debilitating brain damage. Healthy before her fall, the now 6-year-old is blind, in a wheelchair, has a form of cerebral palsy, and can’t communicate beyond rudimentary responses to her parents’ voices.
After a 10-hour deliberation, the trial jury found both the hospital and the pediatrician liable for the child’s injuries. It awarded $21.5 million in damages for Vivianne’s ongoing medical care and $4.6 million in noneconomic damages to her parents.
An attorney for the hospital and pediatrician is expected to contest the award. Specifically, he’s expected to ask that the trial judge impose Nebraska’s $2.25 million cap on medical malpractice verdicts, thereby reducing the total award to $4.5 million, to be split evenly between Vivianne and her parents.
If that happens, the attorney for the plaintiffs has promised to contest the request, arguing that the state’s cap is unconstitutional and that the child’s lifetime medical bills will far exceed it.
University’s negligence caused them unnecessary suffering, women claim
A group of seven women has sued Yale University Medical School, in New Haven, Conn., for failing to safeguard the pain medication normally used during in vitro fertilization treatments, reports a story on Eyewitness News3 and other news sites.
The women’s suit follows a March 2021 guilty plea by a Yale staff nurse who was addicted to pain meds. In her plea, the nurse admitted to using a syringe to extract fentanyl from vials and then refilling those same vials with saline. Federal prosecutors say that at least 175 vials – some containing only saline and others with trace amounts of fentanyl – were tampered with in this manner.
As a result of Yale’s failure to guard against such actions, the women claim, they were subjected to unnecessary trauma and stress during their IVF treatments, which experts say can be unpleasant and take a physiologic toll on the body without the proper pain control.
The current suit won’t be the last, says the attorney representing the group of seven women. “We have somewhere on the line of 40-50 women who’ve been affected who contacted us,” he says.
A spokesperson for Yale declined to comment on the pending litigation.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.