Consumers and trial lawyers have been saying for years that if doctors would do a better job establishing standards and policing their own there would be less injuries and death and therefore less malpractice claims and (maybe) lower malpractice insurance. The anesthesiologists figured this out and today, in constant dollars,…
As a lawyer who has done medical malpractice work for 24 years I am embarrassed to say this, but I came across this little tidbit a couple weeks ago while preparing for an argument in the Tennessee Supreme Court. Do we have the discovery rule for med mal cases? “Yes.”…
This is a fascinating opinion. Defendants in medical negligence cases try to argue that, say, because a bowel is perforated in 15 in 10,000 cases of a certain surgery it was not negligent to perforate the bowel in the subject surgery. The Supreme Court of Virginia just ruled that that…
There is yet another article that provides more data undermining the alleged need for restrictions on the right of patients to sue negligent health care providers. According to the abstract of a study published in Health Affairs “we used data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to study the…
The Fourth District Court of Appeals in Florida has ruled that a pharmacist may be held liable for failure to follow the standard of care for pharmacists even though the pharmacist dispensed drugs pursuant to a doctor’s order. The plaintiff alleged that the pharmacist should have intervened to stop the…
The distinction between a lack of informed consent case and a pure medical battery case is set out in Blanchard v. Kellum, 975 S.W.2d 522 (Tenn. 1998). An informed consent case requires expert proof as to the standard of care (or recognized standard of acceptable professional practice) of similar medical…
The Texas Supreme Court has held that it is not error for a judge to permit a lawyer who regularly represents defendants in medical negligence cases to sit on a medical neligence jury. The lawyer/juror candidly admitted that he would tend to relate to the defense lawyers in the case…
The highest court of New York has rejected in part the medical negligence claim of a woman who sued a doctor and others for emotional distress but permitted the claim of the child to go forward. The mother claimed that the doctor told her that the seven week old fetus…
Those of us who have lived through a couple of the so-called medical malpractice insurance crises knew it was just a matter of time before the market softened. The time has come. The industry has declared that the insurance crisis is over. Read this fascinating article. Of course, the facts…
The Supreme Court of North Dakota has ruled that whether or not a reasonable patient would accept the risk of death from a procedure is a jury question and not one for which expert testimony is necessary. The plaintiff’s wife died after an IVP. The doctors admitted that they did…