It can be very difficult to win a medical malpractice case.
Why?
1st patients generally like and trust their doctors.
A lot of patients who are the victims of malpractice by their doctor or hospital still will not sue them.
They feel their doctor or hospital did their best….
2nd when someone does sue for medical malpractice the hospital and the doctor sued usually have the very best professionals they can find backing them up.
Often the doctor who will be the expert for the sued Dr. is a Ivy League graduate who looks like he just came out of GQ when he’s testifying in front of the jury.
Pittsburgh wrongful death, medical malpractice, slip and fall, car accident and criminal defense attorney Bernie Tully can tell you from personal experience that appearances really do matter in jury trials.
A medical malpractice case is no different.
But once in a while all the stars align for a jury to see the light.
And when they do align boy a jury can take their role seriously.
Pittsburgh wrongful death, medical malpractice, slip and fall, car accident and criminal defense attorney Bernie Tully read where a Philadelphia jury gave a brain-damaged woman $44 million in a medical malpractice case.
The basis for the malpractice was that the hospital and the doctor gave the poor woman too much anticoagulant medication when she was suffering an adverse reaction from it.
Tragically this led to her brain bleed.
Check out this article from the Legal Intelligencer:
“A Philadelphia jury has hit the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with a $44.1 million verdict for failing to recognize a woman’s adverse reaction to anticoagulant medication before she suffered a brain hemorrhage.
The verdict in Tate v. The Hospital of The University of Pennsylvania came down Wednesday afternoon, with the jury finding the hospital 65 percent liable, and an attending doctor 35 percent liable.
The trial lasted for 13 days, and the jury deliberated for about seven hours over two days. Trial was held in front of Court of Common Pleas Judge Frederica Massiah-Jackson.
The trial came down to the alleged failure of the hospital staff to recognize changes in plaintiff Andrea Tate’s blood after she was put on the anticoagulant drug, heparin.The changes should have been a clear warning that Tate was at a high risk for brain hemorrhage.
According to Tate’s pre-trial memo, testing done to determine whether blood is becoming too thin was performed on Tate after she underwent a procedure to remove a benign tumor on tissue covering her brain. For six days, those test results showed Tate’s coagulation was moving from the low end of the normal spectrum to the high end.
The hospital did not stop the heparin at that point.Three days later, they found her virtually comatose from a massive bleed in her head.”
Pittsburgh wrongful death, medical malpractice, car accident and auto accident attorney Bernie Tully believes that the best way to stop hospital errors and malpractice from becoming rampant is by lawsuits like this.
When the facts are correct as they were in this case, the jury gets it right.
$44 million right to this poor brain-damaged woman.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading.
Bernie the Attorney.