Patient Exposed To Another's Blood: Hospital Not Liable
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
August 1995
Quick Summary: An emergency room patient sued a hospital after he sat in the blood of another patient on a hospital stretcher. The blood was under two vinyl pads upon which the patient was sitting, but seemed to have seeped through the slit between the pads and come in contact with his bottom. A physician conducted a rectal exam in the emergency room and determined that no blood had entered the patient’s rectum. A test of the patient’s stools was also negative for the presence of blood.
The Supreme Court of Connecticut upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of the hospital and dismissed the case.
The patient in this case claimed that his fear arose from a belief that the blood on the stretcher, which came in contact with the skin of his buttocks, could have been introduced into his rectum when the physician performed the rectal exam. The court concluded there was no reasonable basis for such a fear.
The patient relied upon the expert testimony of an emergency room nurse. She testified the patient’s fear of contracting HIV or AIDS was reasonable under the circumstances. However, the court was not persuaded that the reasonableness of a person’s fear is something to which an expert should be able to testify, and discounted the witness.
The court noted that this witness, although she was a registered nurse and an expert on the standard of care for emergency room procedures, was not an expert on infectious diseases or infection control practices. Thus she was not permitted to say whether contact between the patient’s skin and another’s blood was a possible means of transmission of the HIV virus. Absent such proof, the court would not conclude it was reasonable for the patient to claim he feared HIV transmission under these circumstances. Barrett vs. Hospital, 654 A. 2d 748 (Conn., 1995).