The following blog entry is written to illustrate an example of a personal 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 brain injury lawsuit and its proceedings.)
TEXT:
10/15/96 – Plff, female age 13, student at Sacramento Middle School. This case arises from an incident when Plff Curtis collapsed forward onto her face on the gravel track while running a timed mile on a remote athletic field, went into ventricular fibrillation and sudden cardiac arrest. Fellow middle school students witnessed Curtis’s collapse, noted that Curtis’s eyes were rolled back in her head and she was not breathing. No communications devices were present on the remote athletic field and the instructor did not know what to do.
Two 13-year-old students then ran to an adjacent field to try to summon assistance. After speaking to a teacher on the adjacent field, they ran from there, to the school office. After some discussion with the office staff, a call for medical assistance was finally made.
Curtis was revived by paramedics and taken to the hospital where it was determined that she had suffered permanent brain damage. Investigation into the incident afterwards raised questions regarding actions taken by the school, the amount of time it took to initiate CPR and to summon assistance, and the absence of an emergency action plan so that staff would know how to react and do so in a manner in which precious time was not lost.
For more information you are welcome to contact Sacramento personal injury lawyer, Moseley Collins.
The critical decisions had to be made by 13-year-old students in the absence of a formal emergency action plan. Plffs contended that undue delays occurred; that these delays were occasioned by the absence of a proper emergency action plan; that the school was on notice that its emergency preparedness was lacking; that proper communications devices should have existed at the remote field; and that Curtis could have been revived without brain damage had proper and prompt action occurred.
For more information you are welcome to contact Sacramento personal injury lawyer, Moseley Collins.