reports a story in the Bowling Green Daily News.
On May 31, 2013, Alice Duff went to Graves-Gilbert Clinic, a multispecialty group whose main campus is in Bowling Green, for hernia surgery. Her surgeon for the procedure at a nearby facility was Tage Haase, MD, a member of the clinic.
Originally, Mrs. Duff was expected to remain in the facility for 23 hours following the procedure. But her recovery didn’t proceed as expected, and that initial period was extended by roughly 3 days. During this time, Ms. Duff’s husband, Lloyd, allegedly requested multiple times that doctors order a CT scan for his wife.
Ten days after the procedure, and with Ms. Duff out of the hospital, the Duffs successfully urged their family physician to order a CT scan. It showed large amounts of free air in Alice’s abdomen, a condition that’s known as pneumoperitoneum.
On June 10, 2013, Mrs. Duff underwent a second surgery, during which doctors discovered that she had sustained a perforated bowel during the first procedure. As a result, her bowel contents had spilled into her abdomen, causing an infection that required an extended hospital stay and five additional surgeries. The infection also led to retinal damage that has left her legally blind.
In their claim against Graves-Gilbert and Dr. Haase, the Duffs argued that Dr. Haase and an assistant doctor who was not named in the suit had failed to meet the standard of care. Specifically, argued the Duffs, because bowel perforation is a known complication in hernia surgeries, Dr. Haase was negligent in not diagnosing and treating Ms. Duff’s problem earlier.
For their part, Graves-Gilbert and Dr. Haase maintained that there was no indication before the second surgery that Mrs. Duff was demonstrating symptoms that necessitated a follow-up procedure. Dr. Haase further argued that Mrs. Duff’s bowel perforation was probably caused by the sawblade-like effect of the suture material he had used to close her incision.
The jury didn’t see it this way, however. It awarded approximately $1.3 million to Mrs. Duff for past medical expenses, plus another $12 million for pain and suffering. Her husband, Lloyd, received an additional $8 million in damages.
The attorney representing the clinic and Dr. Haase has vowed to pursue “all available remedies to have the verdict vacated and the case set for a new trial.”
Case hinged on proper use of a ‘power morcellator’
A claim for punitive damages has been thrown out against a New Jersey doctor and the hospital he’s affiliated with, in a ruling that could help to clarify the standards for such damages in medical malpractice cases, according to a story first reported on NorthJersey.com.
In October 2014, Howard H. Jones, MD, director of minimally invasive gynecologic surgery at The Valley Hospital, in Ridgewood, N.J., treated a patient from nearby Nyack, N.Y., for uterine fibroid tumors. As part of that treatment at the hospital, Dr. Jones used a “laparoscopic power morcellator,” which during a myomectomy procedure cuts, or morcellates, fibroid tumors into pieces small enough to be removed through an incision that’s generally 2 cm or fewer.
While use of the device offers doctors an alternative to open surgery and its longer recovery times, it also risks spreading previously undiagnosed cancer cells throughout the abdomen, thereby shortening a patient’s life. Because of this risk, which has given rise to a number of malpractice cases around the country, the Food and Drug Administration issued a draft guidance in the spring of 2022 for the use of power morcellators.
One recommendation is that physicians employ a “compatible” containment system to catch morcellated tissue, including any with cancer cells. Another is that the device be used selectively, which is to say on patients who have a minimal cancer risk and who have been informed of the procedure’s possible side effects beforehand.
Within a month of the procedure, the patient was diagnosed with metastatic leiomyosarcoma and died in September 2015. Following her death, her sister, the executor of her estate, sued both The Valley Hospital and Dr. Jones. In her suit, the sister argued that the defendants knew, or should have known, the risks involved in using a power morcellator because of both an earlier (2014) FDA “safety communication” discouraging the use of the device and the death of another of Dr. Jones’ patients following a similar procedure the year before.
The suit further alleged that, even after the FDA had issued its safety caution, the hospital had used the device on 37 other patients, “without informing them of the [FDA] letter or obtaining their informed consent to use the device.”
In light of these alleged lapses, Mirian Rivera, the patient’s sister, sought both compensatory and punitive damages. Historically, punitive damages have been limited to the small number of med-mal cases where a doctor or hospital has been found to have acted with actual malice or “wanton and willful disregard.”
Both Valley and Dr. Jones strongly disagreed with Ms. Rivera’s claim, arguing that prior to the procedure Dr. Jones had in fact met with the patient several times and had conducted the proper cancer-detecting tests. Moreover, the defendants emphasized, the request for punitive damages in the absence of actual malice or other factors would almost certainly establish a dangerous legal precedent. Several industry groups – including the American Medical Association, the Medical Society of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Hospital Association – agreed and filed friend-of-court briefs in support of Valley Hospital and Dr. Jones.
But two lower courts refused to dismiss the plaintiff’s claims for punitive damages. That’s when attorneys for Valley and Dr. Jones appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court. (Claims against the device manufacturer, a German company, had already been resolved.)
Ruling unanimously, the high court sided with the defendants: “As a matter of law, the evidence presented, even affording plaintiffs all favorable inferences, does not establish that defendants’ acts or omissions were motivated by actual malice or accompanied by wanton and willful disregard for the patient’s health and safety.”
The court also found that Valley had in fact reviewed hospital policy and drafted a patient-consent form after the release of the 2014 FDA safety communication on power morcellators. (The consent form had not been adopted before the surgery in question, however.)
The suit will now go back to Superior Court in Bergen County, New Jersey; unless a settlement is reached beforehand, the jury will weigh claims of negligence and compensatory damages.
At press time, no trial date had been set.