Tennessee Injury Law Center
This happens more than you might expect. Each year, there are over 57 million medical office visits, and 40 million emergency room visits related to injuries. A tremendous amount of malpractice happens during those visits. According to John Hopkins, 795,000 patients each year will suffer serious harm from a misdiagnosis alone. Medication errors and health care-associated infections are also leading causes of harm to patients. Roughly, 250,000 patients will die from medical errors. So, what happens when you get injured by a vicious dog or injured in a car wreck, and then a medical professional makes a mistake that makes it worse?
The easiest way to explain how the law handles this situation is with some examples. Let’s assume that you were involved in a car accident, and you suffered several serious injuries including a ruptured spleen.
SCENARIO 1 – The spleen injury was severe, and the doctor failed to diagnose it in the emergency room because he or she was addressing other serious injuries. Because the spleen injury was left untreated for a short time, you developed life-threatening internal bleeding requiring a much longer hospital stay and a longer recovery period, but you eventually fully recover.
SCENARIO 2 – In this scenario, the severely ruptured spleen was diagnosed in the emergency room, and you are sent for immediate surgery. During the surgery, the doctor punctured your colon. Your condition worsened after surgery and the medical professionals failed to notice. You developed sepsis and died.
SCENARIO 3 – In this final scenario, the emergency room doctor sends you to surgery to repair the ruptured spleen. While sedated, the surgeon commits a sexual assault against you.
Who is responsible under each scenario? Under Tennessee law, there is a legal doctrine called “the original tortfeasor rule”. At its simplest, this rule says that if you cause someone harm and that person’s injury is worsened (enhanced harm) by another person trying to help you after the initial harm, whether it be a Good Samaritan or a doctor, you as the original tortfeasor (the original source of harm) are still responsible for the enhanced harm caused by the doctor or other person. The original tortfeasor rule extends responsibility for the enhanced harm because it is foreseeable that someone who is hurt may need medical attention, or some other form of help and the enhanced injury was incurred as part of that help or medical attention.
With this in mind, let’s look at the three scenarios above. In the 1st scenario, the doctor clearly missed the ruptured spleen, and it prolonged the recovery of the accident victim. However, the doctor missed the ruptured spleen because he or she was addressing other serious injuries. This is likely to be viewed as foreseeable and the person who caused the car crash will still be found responsible for the enhanced injuries and longer recovery caused by the failure to address the spleen injury earlier.
In the 2nd scenario, the accidental puncturing of the colon was a mistake, but most doctors will tell you that type of mistake is, in fact, foreseeable in that type of surgery because of the proximity of other organs and the colon. This is likely to be viewed as foreseeable. BUT, is it foreseeable that the medical professionals would fail to notice your deteriorating condition post-surgery causing your death? That is a closer call and will depend on how long the internal bleeding went undiagnosed and the symptoms you were presenting. The person who caused the car accident may or may not be held responsible. The person who caused the car accident can try to shift blame to the doctor as a defense in the car wreck case, but they will bear the burden of proof on this issue. In other words, if they want to claim the car wreck was not what caused the death but instead the failure to recognize and treat the sepsis, then they will need to have testimony from a medical expert to try and make that argument. In this situation, in addition to a claim arising from the car accident, you may have a medical malpractice claim as well.
In the 3rd scenario, you would not have been in the hospital but for the car accident; however, a sexual assault by a medical doctor while the patient is sedated is almost certainly not foreseeable and the original tortfeasor is unlikely to be held responsible for this injury.
This is a complex topic, and this was a long post because these concepts are hard to distill into a blog post, but we have covered the basics. If you are involved in a situation like this, we urge you to contact our office or the office of another experienced and reputable injury attorney for more information on your legal rights. As always, our award-winning attorneys handle all accident and medical malpractice cases on a contingency basis so we only get paid if we recover money for you.
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