MRI Claustrophobic Panic Reaction: Patient Can Sue For Psychological Harm
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
Quick Summary: The patients nurses should have explained the MRI and warned of potential claustrophobic effects.
They should have taken an adequate medical and psychological history from the patient, including his pre-existing asthmatic condition, which would make it all the more difficult for him if he had breathing problems from a panic reaction during the MRI procedure.
His caregivers should have closely monitored the patient during the course of the MRI procedure.
As the patient was not being monitored, his caregivers were not ready to terminate the procedure at once and extract him when he began to have breathing difficulties and wanted to end the procedure.
The patient claimed he sustained PTSD, anxiety and generalized depression, due to his caregivers negligence.
The patient has the right to sue his caregivers and the hospital, even though he sustained no direct physical harm.
SUPREME COURT OF OREGON, 1998.The Supreme Court of Oregon acknowledged that as a general rule the law does not allow lawsuits for damages for emotional distress in negligence cases unless the victim has sustained some sort of physical harm.
Having said that, the court made note of a major exception to the rule: the relationship that exists between a patient and a patient’s healthcare providers. Healthcare professionals are held to a legal standard of care that includes the specific duty to be aware of and to guard against particular adverse psychological reactions or consequences of medical procedures, according to the court.
The court conspicuously left out any discussion of whether a particular discipline bears responsibility in this area. That did not seem to matter. In other words, the court did not say that physicians or nurses or imagining technicians can be singled out as having a responsibility in this area which is not shared by the other disciplines. The medical imaging corporation and the hospital were whom the patient sued, and the court deemed it proper for both to be held responsible in a civil court suit.
The court also did not mention what area of the body was being targeted, or the nature or seriousness of the medical condition the physicians were trying to confirm or rule out with the MRI.
It is not true, according to the court, that healthcare professionals can be sued every time a patient is psychologically upset by a healthcare intervention.
According to the court, there are certain specific interventions that carry with them known foreseeable risks of adverse psychological reactions. The court ruled steps must be taken to assess the particular patients susceptibility to foreseeable adverse reactions and steps must be taken to minimize or to avoid them.
Curtis v. Imaging, 956 P. 2d 960 (Or., 1998).