Articles Posted in In The News

A Pennsylvania appeals court upheld the decision of a malpractice lawsuit win for law firm Willig Williams.

The suit was brought, accusing the firm of stymieing a hospital worker’s plans to bring a medical malpractice claim against his employer for an injury he said he sustained during treatment for a previous injury suffered on the job.

A three judge panel determined that Willig Williams and their counsel had not committed malpractice by inking a settlement on behalf of Gerald Cohen, an employee at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. The lawsuit put to rest the claims being made by Cohen for both the initial workplace injury and the subsequent injury he suffered undergoing treatment under his employer’s care.

Media personality and Fox News reporter, Geraldo Rivera, appeared in a Manhattan Civil Court on Thursday for settlement talks for a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Rivera, 72, is suing the Hospital for Special Surgery on East 70th Street after he went in for back surgery in 2010 and came out with a crippled right foot when the surgery was botched.

Rivera claims that he has lost enjoyment of life because he can no longer jog, play tennis, ski or even keep up with his 10-year-old daughter.

The legal counsel for the plaintiff in a medical malpractice case against a physician and his employee has petitioned to be excused from his responsibility of counsel. Derek R. Layser of Layser & Freiwald in Philadelphia, motioned to the Court to be removed as attorney of record for Linda Hydro, citing “irreconcilable differences” related to the legal action. Layser claimed to have noticed Hydro that same day, and asked for a 45-day window for Hydro to secure new counsel.

Layser also informed the court that he would give specific details as to his decision to withdraw to the court, if necessary, but only before an on-camera hearing and not in the presence of the defendants in the case.

A hearing on this matter was set for Monday in Court chambers at Philadelphia City Hall.

Physician Farid Fata, MD will serve 45 years in prison and pay over $17 million after he told numerous patients that they had cancer and administered medically unnecessary chemotherapy drugs.

Prosecutors were pushing for a much heavier sentence for Fata, 175 years behind bars for the Hematologist-oncologist. Prosecutors say that Fata used his medical degree to violate the trust of his patients, give them unwarranted and dangerous treatments and to defraud Medicare in order to take advantage of patients and profit from it.

Even Chief Richard Weber of the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) commented on the callousness of Fata’s actions in the case. “This is the most egregious case of fraud and deception that I have seen in my career,” he said, then added, “This disgusting and diabolical scheme has hurt hundreds of patients and their families and stolen from them something that no punishment from the court can do to make them whole.”

Sometimes patients and their families will have questions as to whether or not the standard of care that they have received from a doctor, hospital or other medical facility was according to the standard of care or if the incident constitutes medical malpractice.

One such example was written in to an advice column by a woman to a consulting attorney asking after the care her son received after a motorcycle accident.

According to the letter, her son had been in a motorcycle accident and suffered a severe case of road rash that ended with him having a hole in his arm. The motorcyclist was given pain pills and keep the wound uncovered and to scrub it daily. He was not, however given any antibiotics to address the potential of infection.

The survivors of a woman who died as a result of a methadone overdose in 2008 have been awarded $512,000 by a jury in New London Superior Court.

According to court documents, Jill Procaccini, 32, died just hours after she was treated and released from the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital emergency room. Procaccini’s estate has filed suit against emergency room physician, Thomas E. Marchiondo and the Emergency Medicine Physicians of New London, a firm which hired the emergency room doctors at L+M hospital. Lawrence + Memorial Hospital had also been named as a defendant in the lawsuit, but was removed from the suit before the malpractice suit went to trial.

Attorney for the plaintiffs, Matthew Auger of the Suisman Shapiro law firm, stated within a written summary of the case that Procaccini had spent much of her both as a heroin and cocaine addict and had been battling those addictions for many years.

A woman whose husband died as a result of gastrointestinal issues is suing the Tulane University School of Medicine and a physician employed there for medical malpractice.

The lawsuit was filed by Heather Leeming, individually and on behalf of her minor child, Kobe Leeming, and her deceased husband, James D. Leeming. The lawsuit names The Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, Tulane University School of Medicine, and Dr. Michael Roysteras defendant in the case. The malpractice suit was filed in the Orleans Parish First Civil District Court on May 28.

Within the court documents, the plaintiff asserts that in May 2011 her husband was admitted to Tulane for a gastrointestinal bleed. He was under the care of the facility’s medical staff until his death one month later. Leeming alleges that her husband’s death was caused by an excessive blood loss from a GI bleed and that the plaintiff failed to properly examine and evaluate the patient. The plaintiff is also accused of failing to alert the attending physician of the patient’s deteriorating condition and blood loss and failing to place him in ICU in a timely fashion.

A woman whose grandson died after a diagnostic procedure that allegedly perforated his colon is suing for malpractice.

According to 24th Judicial District Court documents, Emily Mae Dobard has filed a malpractice lawsuit on behalf of Terril Dobard against Ochsner Clinic Foundation, Ochsner Medical Center Westbank, Dr. Rebekah Lemann, Dr. Travis Hill and Dr. Emery Minnard early last month.

The plaintiff, Emily Dobard, claims that she is the closest living relative to her grandson, Terril Dobard who died in the care of the defendants. Terril Dobard went to Ochsner Medical Center Westbank on March 4, 2012, complaining of abdominal pain and digestive issues. He was diagnosed with a bowel obstruction. Three days later on March 7, he was placed on an IV for hydration. Dobard asserts in the lawsuit that her grandson underwent a series of tests that identified a malignant tumor in his bowel. It was during one of the procedures that Terril Dobard’s bowel had been punctured. Terril Dobard died on March 8, 2012 from a pulmonary embolism. Dobard claims that the death of her grandson was caused by the invasive testing which caused the puncture of his bowel.

The potential dangers surrounding a widely used blood thinning drug have again come under scrutiny in patients, doctors and families with loved ones who are on the medication.

Patients, mostly those who are elderly, often are prescribed the drug Coumadin, or its generic version, Warfarin, as a blood thinner that is used to help reduce the incidence of clots or to regulate abnormal heart rhythm. Coumadin must be carefully calibrated to avoid the chance of uncontrolled bleeding if too much is given or if a patient received too little, they can develop blood clots which in some instances, can be fatal.

In an analytic study conducted by ProPublica, it was suggested that there are thousands of injuries of deaths or serious injuries every year that occur when a nursing home or similar care facility fails to maintain the delicate balance when administering Coumadin. From 2011 to 2014, there were at least 165 nursing home residents were hospitalized or died after errors involving Coumadin that were examined by the government. That leaves many others that are either uninvestigated or unreported.

A patient who went to his doctor for a colonoscopy wanted to make certain that he got the instructions his doctor would give after the surgery. So he activated the record function on his smartphone. The device ended up under him and what was recorded during the procedure, he got far more than he bargained for.

While the patient was unconscious the surgical team had made many disparaging remarks, joked about a rash on his body, and at times the team mocked him. One member of the team advised an assistant to lie to him, to avoid him after the procedure, and to put down a false diagnosis on his chart.

The patient rightfully sued the doctors for defamation and for medical malpractice and other related offenses. A Fairfax County jury sided with the patient and ordered the surgical team to pay him $500,000.