Pedestrian v. Grocery Store
A woman was standing on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store waiting to speak with an employee of the store. A few minutes later, the employee drove to the front of the store and lost control of his car. The employee drove the car onto the sidewalk and over the top of the woman. The employee’s car dragged the woman for several feet as she was trapped beneath the vehicle. Several people, including the woman’s husband, had to lift the vehicle to free her from beneath the car. The accident resulted in severe injury to the woman including several fractures to her pelvis and a collapsed lung.
A father and husband suffered catastrophic injures, including massive injuries to his internal organs, internal bleeding and double retinal blindness, when a large wood recycling machine crushed him while he was cleaning the machine at the end of a work day. The machine was a large sifting machine that was manufactured by a foreign company. The manufacturer's design defect allowed the machine, when the engine was off and locked out, to still lower the huge sifting bed. This occurred when an unguarded lever was triggered.
The client's husband underwent a total knee replacement, the same surgery that he had undergone four months earlier. Immediately after the surgery, the nurses placed him on a PCA (Patient Controlled Anesthesia) machine that would allow him to self-administer Dilaudid, a pain killer eight times as potent as morphine. The PCA machine is designed to respond to the patient's perceived pain levels, but to ensure safety, nurses must set a ceiling on the total amount of medicine that the patient can administer with each push of the PCA button and the total within a specific time-frame, to ultimately prevent overdoses and even death. In this terrible situation, the first set of nurses in the post-anasthesia recovery unit, were responsible for setting the cap on the PCA. The first nurse was to set the ceiling according to the specific order by the surgeon, and she set it 3.5 times higher than ordered. Then, the second nurse was to double check the setting with the actual physician's order, to avoid this exact mistake. Unfortunately, she failed to do so. Shortly thereafter, the patient was transfered to the regular floor. Upon transfer, two additional nurses were to go through the same procedure, confirming the order with the setting, to prevent an overdose. This was all required by the hospital's protocols. All four nurses failed to follow hospital policies and procedures. Consequently, the patient, a father and husband, euthanized himself by self-administering pain medication to the point of death, right in front of his unsuspecting and eventually terrified wife. To compound this tragedy, the medical staff and risk manager met with the widow shortly after her husband's death, and informed her that they had made a mistake but it did not cause his death. In fact, after Brown & Gessell started investigating the death, we discovered that the nurses had covered up the error. In deposition, one of the nurses admitted that she had changed the chart and another nurse admitted that she was aware of this cover-up. Brown & Gessell held them accountable and it led to a very favorable settlement that will never bring back her husband, but does help her continue her life.
