The following blog entry is written to illustrate an example of a birth injury case. Reviewing this kind of lawsuit should help potential plaintiffs and clients better understand how parties in personal injury cases present such issues to the court.
(Please also note: the names and locations of all parties have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the participants in this birth injury lawsuit and its proceedings.)
The nurse left Travis and her husband, Evan Travis, alone in the labor and delivery room. In the meantime, other labor and delivery nurses let the obstetrician go home to dinner without telling her about Sarah’s symptoms or admission.
Sacramento Hospital is a Level 3 hospital specializing in high-risk deliveries. It was delivering 4,300 babies per year and had one charge nurse to cover 49 rooms on two hospital floors. The hospital allows only obstetricians to perform Caesarian sections. It had an anesthesiologist and a neonatologist available to start the anesthesia and resuscitate the baby, but it did not have an obstetrician available to perform the surgery
after the attending physician went home to dinner.
When the nurses let the obstetrician go home, there were 33 pregnant women and 16 newborns in the labor and delivery unit.
The attending nurse went back to the Travis’ room and figured out the baby’s heart rate was dropping on the monitor, so she had the charge nurse call the obstetrician at home to tell her to come back to the hospital. The nurses knew the baby was being asphyxiated, but they did not transfer the mother to the operating room. They did not want the patient and her husband to be waiting in the operating room until the obstetrician arrived, because the couple would then know there was no physician available to deliver the baby.
For more information you are welcome to contact Sacramento personal injury lawyer, Moseley Collins.
Consequently, the nurses did not prepare Sarah for surgery. When the obstetrician arrived, she reportedly yelled at the nurses, ripped the bed out of the wall, and ran the bed down the hall to the operating room for a crash Caesarian section.
By the time of the delivery May 30, 2003, M.T. had suffocated inside the uterus, resulting in cerebral palsy. The treating obstetrician and the pediatric neurologist diagnosed perinatal asphyxia, caused by placental abruption.
For more information you are welcome to contact Sacramento personal injury lawyer, Moseley Collins.