Here is an article from LawyersUSAonline.com relating to a recent verdict returned by a Georgia verdict in a pressure ulcer case:
A Georgia jury has awarded $1.25 million to the family of a nursing home patient who died from a severe bed sore that the family alleged was caused by inadequate care at the home.
Melvin Raybon, a 67-year-old diabetic with past serious health problems was admitted to Tucker Nursing Home in 2002. Nine months later, he was moved to a treatment hospital for a Stage 4 bed sore that infected his left buttock to the bone.
After being moved to yet another nursing home, Raybon's conditioned worsened and he began suffering from malnutrition as a result of the original infection. He fell into a catabolic state and in June 2004, he died.
For plaintiff attorney Benjamin Land, the issue was showing jurors that Raybon's death likely would not have occurred if not for the original bed sore, which, Land inferred, was a direct cause of the understaffed Tucker Nursing Home.
"Nursing homes are in business to take care of people with health problems and limitations," said Land. "[Jurors] expect nursing homes to do what they're paid to do. The point of this trial was to prove to jury that negligence had occurred and they did not take care of Mr. Raybon."
Defense attorney Walter Bush Jr., representing Kindred Healthcare (the previous owners of Tucker Nursing Home), claimed the size of the settlement was a result of the judge in the trial misreading state law and plans to appeal.
"Speaking to the jury, I got the impression if the judgment had followed the law it would have been in the range we expected to pay during the [pre-trial] settlement case."
Understaffed home
Land approached his case by showing that the quality of care at Tucker Nursing Home was detrimental to patients and was a direct result of understaffing.
His primary piece of evidence was the testimony of four former certified nursing assistants who worked at the home. All four testified that the lack of employees resulted in occasionally being unable to give each patient the care they needed.
In Raybon's case, not only was he diabetic, he had suffered from a brain tumor previously and had to have part of his skull removed. A past amputation of his leg and incontinence required him to be turned in bed every two hours. The four assistants claimed because of understaffing, they were only available to turn him twice during an eight-hour shift and sometimes not even that many.
"The gist of their testimony was that if they had had more staff, these problems caused to [Mr. Raybon] would likely not have occurred," said Land.
The defense argued the testimony of the four assistants should have been inadmissible.
"Three of them had no personal knowledge of Mr. Raybon," said Bush. "We moved to eliminate these testimonies because they were in effect to introduce similar acts as proof of another negligent act. It's just character evidence that this was a bad place to work with bad working conditions, and that is not probative evidence whatsoever with regard to the deviation of standard of care."
Bush further argued that the issue of staffing at a medical facility should not be determined by former employees but by an expert opinion, which was not provided by the plaintiffs.
"The issue of staffing should never be based on the perception of an individual who claimed they had too much work to do, but on a number of factors such as the underlying conditions and the layout of a facility."
Chain reaction verdict?
Land did not argue the case as a wrongful death suit, but rather based the settlement demands on Mr. Raybon's "loss of dignity in the last year of his life."
He deferred to Georgia's joint and several liability laws, which make an initial hospital or nursing home liable for further injuries stemming from an original injury, even if the additional injuries occur somewhere else.
While Bush did not dispute that, he said it was a violation of Georgia law for the plaintiffs to seek payment for medical bills under the instruction that the initial pressure sore at Tucker was somehow responsible for all subsequent injuries caused off the premises of the home.
Bush called the final award a "chain reaction verdict" that was an "erroneous and inappropriate" instruction on the part of Judge J. Antonio DelCampo.
But the jurors did not agree, and awarded Raybon's daughter, Yolanda Latimore $1.25 million for medical bills and other compensatory damages. According to the complaint, Latimore had repeatedly asked management at Tucker to better care of her father, though she was often busy taking care of her mother, Shirley Raybon, who had breast cancer at the time.
Land claimed the decision to not go for a wrongful death suit was key, and appealed to the jurors.
"We decided the case is about human dignity and the value of that dignity during a man's last year on earth. Defenses tend to want to blame the residents' injuries on underlying medical problems. In my opinion, juries don't buy that."
