$4.5 Million Jury Award Against Paramedics Who Missed Signs Of Placental Abruption
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-06-30 13:53:40 | Word Count: 583
Paramedics are often the first to respond to medical emergencies. Paramedics are licensed health care providers who owe a duty to meet the standard of care to those they respond to and treat. As the first on the scene we count on paramedics to have the knowledge, training, and experience to differentiate between conditions that can be treated at the scene from the ones that require immediate transport to a hospital with the necessary equipment and full medical staff. This article analyzes a case involving an expectant mother who called in from her home in the very early morning complications from her pregnancy. By the time the paramedics arrived at the house the woman was already in shock because of abrupt blood loss resulting from by a placental abruption. The paramedics failed to figure out the urgency of the circumstance and took about eighteen minutes before transporting her to the hospital.
The total delay in the time it took the paramedics before they decided to move the woman to the hospital where the baby was delivered was at least eighteen minutes. In the 18 minutes that passed the pregnant woman's unborn child suffered from hypoxia as a result of the blood loss from the placental abruption.. The newborn died one day after being born. The mother's blood loss was so extreme that she had to undergo an additional surgery to stop the bleeding and later temporarily lost kidney function. The law firm that handled this matter sued the paramedics for their failure to understand the woman's condition and their delay in taking her to the hospital.
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The laws dealing with malpractice legal claims for the loss of a newborn differ by State. The State where this claim arose, for example, required that for a woman to succeed on a claim for the emotional damage she endured from the loss of her baby the mother first needs to establish that she experienced a physical injury that was due to the same negligence that caused the demise of the baby and that the mother's physical injury would not have typically happened in a normal childbirth. The mother suffered from a severe depression half a year following her child's death. The mother underwent treatment with therapy as well as medication. Still, as of the report of the case she was still depressed and expected to require medication for the remainder of her life. The mother met those requirements.|All 3 requisites were present in this case.|Given the injuries the mother herself suffered as a result of the delay by the paramedics, she was able to go forward with a lawsuit.
The law firm that handled the case on her behalf reported that they took the case to trial and achieved a verdict of $4.5 million. Paramedics are health care providers. Paramedics are trained and they are licensed. They are supposed to be able to identify symptoms of emergency health issues and to take appropriate and timely action. When they do not and their actions do not meet the applicable standard of care, they can be liable.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting complex injury cases, including birth injury medical malpractice cases. For additional information about placental abruption and other birth injury matters including group b strep visit the websites
