Jury in Franklin County, New York Awards Unprecedented $2.9 Million for Personal Injury in Hospital Negligence Case

A patient who was sustained permanent brain damage as a direct result of the negligence of a hospital x-ray team received a $2.9 million dollar jury verdict late last week. The patient, who is a married woman from Fort Covington, went into Alice Hyde Medical Center in 2002 for a routine procedure.

That procedure was a barium swallow, a medical imaging procedure used to examine the upper GI tract which includes the esophagus and the stomach. The patient swallows the barium, and usually baking sodium to create a contrast between the dense barium and light, gassy baking sodium, while taking an x-ray of the person's throat.

Here, the technician was positioning the x-ray tube the patient when a cord got caught on the machine's keypad, which caused it to fall onto the patient's forehead. This created a traumatic and permanent brain injury which lead to a lawsuit against the hospital, x-ray manufacturer, and x-ray company. The case failed against the manufacturer.
However, the negligence lawsuit did succeed against the others for $2.9 million dollars! The jury consisted of one man and five women who returned this verdict.

I for one am glad that the jury went outside of the past accepted awarded and gave more to this patient. She went in for a ROUTINE procedure, and came out with a catastrophic injury. I hope this serves a lesson not just to the hospital and its staff, but also to the x-ray company and manufacturer that yeah, maybe you got away this time, but cords should not be getting stuck on keyboards. Even if it did not happen once in the six years that machine was there, the fact that there is a POSSIBLITY it could happen is just horrifying!

But what do you think? I would love to hear from you! Leave a comment or I also welcome your phone call on my toll-free cell at 1-866-889-6882 or you can drop me an e-mail at jfisher@mmolaw.net. You are always welcome to request my FREE book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Malpractice Victims, at the home page of my website at www.protectingpatientrights.com.