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Miscarriage: Hospital Liable For Nurse Inflicting Emotional Distress On Patient
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
July 1996
Quick Summary: The nurse’s stated purpose was to alleviate the mother’s stress and to help her bond with the fetus. The nurse had her hold the pan with the dead fetus, and photographed her holding it.
A pregnant woman and her husband came to the emergency room. She had severe abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding and nausea.
An ultrasound the day before at the same hospital showed she was sixteen weeks pregnant.
An hour and a half later, before anyone saw her, she miscarried in an examining room with only her husband present. She waited fifteen more minutes to be seen, with the bloody dead fetus dangling between her legs.
A physician came in, cut the umbilical cord and placed the fetus in a metal pan.
The court upheld an award of damages against the hospital and physician in favor of the woman for negligent infliction of emotional distress, but denied her husband’s claim for a similar award of damages. SUPERIOR COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1996.
The Superior Court of Pennsylvania upheld a lower court judge’s decision to award damages for negligent infliction of emotional distress to a woman who experienced a miscarriage in a hospital emergency department examining room, and then was given the dead bloody fetus by a nurse to hold and to be photographed.
The nurse testified her rationale in doing this had been to alleviate the mother’s stress and to assist her in bonding with the fetus she had just lost.
In addition to these actions by the nurse, the court ruled that the hospital was negligent for not seeing that the patient was attended to prior to her miscarriage as was the physician for not seeing to the patient more promptly, contributing to the emotional distress the patient experienced in this incident.
The were no allegations put forward in this case that more prompt medical intervention could have prevented the miscarriage or have saved the fetus.
According to the court, it was not necessary for the judge to consider any evidence defining the appropriate standard of care for professional nursing under the circumstances presented in this case. The court ruled that the "matter under consideration in this case was so simple," and the "lack of skill or want of care" was so obvious as to be "within the range of ordinary experience and comprehension of even non-professional persons," which the court ruled permitted the judge to dispense with the usual requirement of expert testimony that the standard of care had been breached, to render a decision against the hospital over the nurse’s actions.
The court
accepted a psychiatrist’s report that the woman was experiencing knots in her
stomach, frequent headaches and nightmares and had a diagnosis of major
depression, all due to the incident.
Brown vs.
Hospital, 674 A. 2d 1130 (Pa. Super., 1996).
More references
from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fetal-remains-parents-sue-hospital.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fetal-demise-nursing-negligence.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/fetal-remains.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/miscarriage-hospital.pdf