Parents Reach $4,500,000 Settlement Due To Nurse Missing Symptoms Of Placental Abruption
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-12-01 19:00:38 | Word Count: 585
It is typical for expectant mothers to put themselves and their unborn child in the hands of a doctor to see them through childbirth. It might oftentimes take a fair amount of time after the patient is admitted to the hospital until the baby is born. During somepart of this time doctors tend to depend on the nurses and staff to track the expectant mother's progress and to keep them advised of any complications that may arise.
The doctor is stil responsible for supervising the nurses and staff. Further, the nurses and staff are accountable for having the knowledge, training and experience to recognize symptoms of problems and for telling the doctor if they do arise. Regrettably, nurses and staff sometimes fail to meet these requirements.
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Look at the reported case regarding a pregnant woman having reached full term started going through contractions while at home and while going to the local hospital the woman also began experiencing nonstop severe pain. When she got to at the hospital the woman complained to the admitting nurse that she was in major pain alerting the nurse that she thought there was a problem. She was taken to the Labor and Delivery unit but the nurse either did not register or ignored her complaints and failed to contact the physician, who had not yet arrived at the hospital, to inform him.
Rather the nurse acted like this was a typical pregnancy. Valuable time went by before she even started checking the fetal heart rate. When she finally did figure out that the unborn child was experiencing fetal distress. Finally the nurse did advise the obstetrician, who even now had not come to the hospital, by telephone. A different physician on the unit took over and performed an emergency C-section. The extreme pain was from a placental abruption. The placental abruption cased the unborn baby to suffer from a reduced supply of oxygen leading to serious brain injury. The child is permanently disabled and has to have 24/7 attention. The law firm that handled this claim announced that the case settled for from the hospital for the nursing staff's failure to recognize that the mother had experienced a placental abruption.
In this case the patient in fact alerted the nurse of her sense that there was a problem with the pregnancy. At this stage in the pregnancy severe persistent abdominal pain can be due to a placental abruption.
It is not known why the nurse failed to connect these. Regardless if she disregarded the patient's complaints, did not hear them, did not have the necessary knowledge, training or experience to correctly understand the situation, or discounted the patient's complaints since a placental abruption is regularly (though not always) coupled with observable vaginal bleeding, she missed signs of a dangerous problem.
The result, however, was a serious injury to the unborn child producing a lifelong disability. On account of the injury caused by the nurse's error the law firm that handled this matter documented that it managed to accomplish a settlement intented to be enough so that the baby has appropriate care for life.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting birth injury cases. You can find out about placental abruption and other birth injury cases such as group b strep matters by visiting the websites
