Premature Discharge From The Hospital: Court Sees No Grounds For Lawsuit Against Nurses.

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Premature Discharge From The Hospital: Court Sees No Grounds For Lawsuit Against Nurses.

In a healthcare negligence lawsuit, the patient’s experts must identify the standard of care and point out a violation of the standard of care by the patient’s care-giver. It is also essential to the success of the patient’s lawsuit that the patient’s expert establish a cause-and-effect link between the caregiver’s negligent act or omission and the adverse outcome for the patient. COURT OF APPEALS OF TEXAS October 17, 2017

The patient’s podiatrist performed surgery to correct a deformity of her foot. The podiatrist ordered that she be kept at the hospital for at least twenty-three hours for observation.

The patient had pain, tingling in her foot and fever which led the podiatrist’s partner who was on call to order IV morphine and to keep her in the hospital nearly three days.

Days after her discharge, when she was seen in the podiatrist’s office, there was dark discoloration of her toes. She was hospitalized for gangrene and six weeks after the initial surgery her leg was amputated below the knee.

The patient’s lawsuit alleged, among other things, that the hospital’s nurses should have monitored the patient more closely and advocated for her to remain in the hospital. The Court of Appeals of Texas dismissed the lawsuit as it applied to the hospital’s nurses.

The patient had expert opinions from a physician and a nurse as to a nurse’s duty to advocate for the nurse’s patient. They said the nurses in this case knew the patient was still in considerable pain and knew it was inappropriate to discharge her. The nurses should have initiated the nursing chain of command to delay her discharge until she had improved. However, the patient’s experts could not convince the Court that remaining longer in the hospital after her surgery, even if invoking the nursing chain of command would have brought that about, would have changed the patient’s medical outcome. Hospital v. Davis, __ S.W. 3d __, 2017 WL 4679280 (Tex. App., October 17, 2017).