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NEW YORK EMERGENCY ROOM MALPRACTICE
71 Year Old Woman awarded $10.7 million for Emergency Room Malpractice
Phil Russotti obtained a $10.7 million award against New York Hospital and Medical Center of Queens for allowing a 66 year old woman to wait in an emergency room for two hours before performing an emergency CT scan of her head.
On September 23, 2004, our client fell down a flight of stairs, fracturing her skull. She was rushed by ambulance to New York Hospital and Medical Center of Queens to determine if she had a bleed in her brain. A CT scan was ordered at 1:30 that afternoon by an Emergency Room physician's assistant, but was not performed until 3:30 p.m. Immediately after the CT scan was performed, she lapsed into a coma in the emergency room, almost died, and required emergency surgery to save her life. She has left-sided hemiparesis, meaning the entire left side of her body is paralyzed. She is currently in a wheelchair, unable to care for herself.
The jury found the hospital negligent for not performing the CT scan immediately, and causing her permanent neurologic damage. Phil proved that certain patients who present to an emergency room are at a high risk for a brain bleed, even though they seem absolutely normal and that they required CT Scans immediately to determine if they have a bleed and require neurological intervention to preserve neurologic function. This procedure was not followed in this case, with a tragic outcome. Our client lives with her husband, for whom the jury awarded $2,000,000 for loss of services of his wife.