Patient’s Fall: Evidence Lacking As To Negligence, Link To Patient’s Medical Outcome.
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There are two fatal flaws in the nursing expert’s opinion the patient’s family has offered to try to prove negligence by the nurses who cared for the patient.
First, as to the question of negligence, the family’s expert’s opinion only recites in general terms that the patient’s nurses failed to meet the standard of care. The family’s expert failed to specify what patient safety measures or other interventions were indicated but not provided and why they were indicated by the expert’s assessment of the patient after the fact.
Second, the patient’s staph infection which preceded her foot amputation was not diagnosed until three weeks after she left the defendant hospital, during which time she was a patient at another hospital and spent sixteen days in a long term care facility. The family’s nursing expert did not try and would not have been considered qualified to sort out the complex medical questions involved in linking the staph infection back to the nurse’s alleged negligence or forward to the patient’s limb amputation.
COURT OF APPEALS OF MISSISSIPPI October 25, 2016The patient was admitted to the hospital with complaints of chronic diarrhea. On admission the nurses assessed her as a significant fall risk. Eight days into her stay the patient fell and dislocated and fractured her ankle while a nurse weighed her on a standing scale. The ankle was wrapped and splinted and the patient was transferred to another hospital for orthopedic surgery. When the splint was removed three days later for the surgery, fecal matter was found on the outside of the splint and a blood blister had formed on the leg. After surgery the patient was sent to a long term care facility for sixteen days, then back to the orthopedic hospital where a staph infection was diagnosed in the wound. Two weeks after that, wound management having failed, the leg was amputated below the knee.
The patient’s family sued the hospital where she fell, claiming that the hospital’s nurse’s negligence caused her to fall and that the fall caused her staph infection and ultimately the amputation of her leg. The Court of Appeals of Mississippi dismissed the case.
To succeed with a healthcare negligence lawsuit, the patient must present proof as to the standard of care applicable to the patient’s caregivers, proof of a breach of the standard of care, and proof that the breach caused the injury for which the patient or patient’s family is seeking compensation in the lawsuit. The patient’s nursing expert’s opinion did not prove negligence. Her opinion was only a general statement that the hospital’s nurses deviated from the standard of care. She did not identify the interventions that were called for and why they were called for based on the patient’s condition. The patient’s expert also did not try to sort out the complex medical question of the cause of the staph infection, and she was not qualified to do so even if she had tried.
Henson v. Hospital, __ So. 3d __, 2016 WL 6212961 (Miss. App., October 25. 2016).More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fall-hospital-nurses-negligent.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fall-getting-out-of-bed.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fall-negligence-nursing-home.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/hospital-fall-nursing-negligence.htm