Settlement: This wrongful death and hospital malpractice action settled for $285,000 in 2006.
Facts:
The actions arose in January 2004 when a hospital resident intended to place a catheter into the patient’s left internal jugular vein, but made an error and placed it in his left carotid artery. The patient was 87 at the time. The doctor failed to recognize the error. Despite emergency surgery that evening at the hospital to remove the catheter and repair the artery, the patient died. Plaintiff’s medical malpractice attorney alleged that the doctor’s error in placing the catheter into the artery was a cause of his death that very night.
Defendant claimed that placing the catheter into the artery instead of the vein is a risk of the procedure. Plaintiff countered that, if it was a risk of the procedure, then the doctor had an obligation to check the blood to insure that the catheter was properly placed.
Other Wrongful Death cases:
$7M– Bronx Medical Malpractice Brain Damage During Childbirth and Subsequent Wrongful Death
Settlement for mother brain damaged during childbirth, who subsequently died (2015).
$550K – Nursing Home Negligence – Broken Hoyer lift.
The sling seat of a Hoyer lift broke, dropping a 70-year-old nursing home resident to the ground in 2016, with numerous fractures and death a year later. Settled March 2022 during trial.
$510K – Brooklyn Wrongful Death and Medical Malpractice.
Pre-trial settlement, May 2024. Failure to diagnose and treat obstructed bile duct from infected gallstones, leading to sepsis and death.
$400K – Queens Medical Malpractice — Hernia Repair, Lacerated Liver, and Ruptured Spleen — Failure To Properly Type Blood — Wrongful Death
Settlement, mid-trial (1997), for the family of a 56-year-old Queens seamstress who bled to death during surgery when her liver was negligently lacerated (in New York, one can not be compensated for grief, only for monetary loss and pain and suffering).
A synopsis of New York’s wrongful death law.
Other New York medical malpractice cases handled by the Turkewitz Firm at this link.
