A mother who gave birth to a brain-damaged child at Stevens Hospital in 1998 won a whopping $17.1 million judgement Friday against the Edmonds medical facility and two physicians.
A Snohomish County Superior Court jury ruled that the defendants were responsible for not diagnosing and treating the condition of the child, who lost 75 percent of his blood in the womb before he was delivered by an emergency Caesarean operation.
He was born with serious brain damage, impaired vision and cerebral palsy because of a rare medical condition called fetal maternal hemorrhage. The hospital maintains that the condition could not be diagnosed.
Medical personnel at Stevens had to resuscitate the infant when he was delivered.
The hospital is responsible for $13.7 million of the award, which will go to a former Lynnwood woman, Tami Lafferty, and her son.
Lafferty could not be reached for comment Sunday.
Lafferty, who now lives in New Jersey, maintained that the tests showed the fetus was in trouble. In addition, instead of sending her back to the hospital the day after Thanksgiving for more tests, the baby should have been delivered immediately, she alleged.
She also charged that Stevens performed the wrong kind of ultrasound, and that another test might have been more effective.
The jury awarded Lafferty $7.5 million. The remainder is to go to her son for past and future medical bills.
Besides the hospital, she named two physicians and Edmonds Family Medicine Clinic as defendants.
Jurors found the hospital was responsible for 80 percent of the damages and the two doctors are responsible for sharing the balance of the award. The clinic was not required to pay any damages, according to the verdict.
The hospital, which has been hit by financial losses in recent years, said it will appeal the huge verdict. Stevens is insured against such losses.
“We have the utmost sympathy for Tami Lafferty and her son. This difficult 1998 case involved a rare health condition of the fetus that was unpredictable and unpreventable,” said Dr. John Todd, Stevens’ chief executive officer, in a statement.
“Due to irregularities and errors throughout the trial in Snohomish County Superior Court, Stevens Hospital must appeal this verdict,” Todd said.
Lafferty went to her physician the day before Thanksgiving in 1998 because she detected decreased movement by the fetus, said Dr. Arthur Castagno, who joined the hospital in 2002 and became head of the radiology department in 2005.
The physician referred her to Stevens for an obstetric ultrasound. Castagno said the ultrasound was interpreted as “normal” by the radiologist.
Castagno said he has viewed a recording of the ultrasound himself, and the fetus appeared to be moving and otherwise healthy.
The day after Thanksgiving, Lafferty returned to her physician with the same complaint. This time, she was sent immediately to the hospital and the fetus’ heart rate was monitored. It was then realized that his heart had stopped beating.
The fetus “was in extremely bad shape,” Castagno said. Lafferty alleged that the hospital should “have been able to predict that bad things were going to happen, and that is simply wrong,” Castagno said.
He said the baby was normal the day before Thanksgiving and something happened in the next two days.
“There is no evidence of anyone being negligent in any way,” Castagno said. From his review, the mother, physicians and hospital did everything they should have done, he said.
“It’s human nature to want to blame somebody when something bad happens,” he said, adding that the jury apparently sympathized with the mother and child.
Todd said the ultrasound had “no effect on the patient outcome. The radiology department employee that handled this case was a short-term employee of Stevens at the time of the procedure with eight previous years of obstetrical ultrasound experience,” Todd said.
The ultrasound took place under a different radiology department administration. Stevens has an entirely new executive management team, he added. The technologist has not been employed at Stevens since 1999.
The publicly supported hospital has suffered through some bad times in recent times with several years of financial losses. The most recent was in 2004 when it finished the year an estimated $1.75 million in the red, and in 2003 when it incurred net losses of $2.45 million.
Last May, the hospital’s board hired a Chicago consulting firm to help it identify cost-cutting measures. Consultant fees are expected to total about $3.7 million by June, according to records provided by the hospital, and cost-cutting is expected to return $3.4 million in savings to the hospital by that same date.
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