Patient's Transfer Delayed: Hospital Responsible for Death, Court Says
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
September 1998
Quick Summary: Inexcusable delay caused the patient’s death. His condition required expeditious transfer to a facility that had the means to treat him.
The patient was brought to the emergency room with an extremely serious medical condition that required immediate treatment.
However, he did not leave for several hours. DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF FLORIDA, 1998.
An ambulance brought the patient in at 4:17 a.m. with serious head trauma. The physician saw him at 4:25 a.m. The physician immediately realized there was a life-threatening brain injury, and that a CT scan was needed before further treatment could be rendered.However, the CT machine was not working, and it was not feasible to get it working. So at 4:46 a.m. an ambulance was called to take the patient to another hospital with a working CT machine and acceptable trauma-care capability.
Then the ambulance was canceled, in a mix-up over the need to get a respiratory therapist to accompany the patient in the ambulance. Someone mistakenly thought the patient was intubated and on a ventilator, which he actually was not.
He got to the second hospital too late to be saved. The family sued. The District Court of Appeal of Florida upheld the jury’s verdict for an unspecified sum.
The court ruled the jury was right that the hospital recklessly disregarded the consequences of its actions by failing to appreciate that delaying this patient’s transfer was likely to cause his death.
Garcia v. Ambulance Service, 710 So. 2d 74 (Fla. App., 1998).