Hospital Negligence

Mount Sinai Hospital is a well-known hospital that borders on Manhattan’s East Harlem and Yorkville neighborhoods. Originally founded in 1852, the center now includes the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which currently ranks among America’s top 20 medical schools. Unfortunately, this ranking isn’t enough to prevent medical malpractice from occurring at the hospital, and one of its more shocking cases involved the in-utero death of an infant.

On 13 December 2017, Jana Diaz arrived at Mount Sinai’s Midwood’s facility in Brooklyn at 1 am due to cramps and bleeding. The hospital did not have a maternity ward or an OBGYN on staff, and no one was immediately called when it became apparent that they did not have the knowledge or facilities needed to treat Jana correctly. In fact, Jana states that it took 90 minutes for the emergency care doctor-on-call to see her and perform an exam and that her unborn baby’s heart rate had dropped to 104 by then. Despite this, Jana says that the hospital staff was more concerned with ensuring that her paperwork was being correctly filled in as opposed to managing her clinically. Jana’s lawyer states that as a clear obstetrical emergency, an emergency C-section should have been performed immediately.

Known as one of the best hospitals in New York City, the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) is considered a leading orthopedic, rheumatology, and neurological care facility. Unfortunately, medical malpractice can still occur in medical centers with such stellar reputations, as evidenced by Bethany Flanders and her filing of a medical malpractice lawsuit against one of the hospital’s doctors.

When Bethany Sanders was 13 years old, she underwent spinal surgery to help treat her serious scoliosis. Despite being doubled over and barely able to walk, Bethany could still see and had normal vision before undergoing the seven-hour operation; however, Bethany came out of the surgery unable to see – a possible surgical side-effect that surgeon Oheneba Boachie-Adjei failed to disclose to her and her family. Additionally, the informed consent form required for such a surgery was never presented to Bethany and her parents, nor was it signed.

When the terms “medical malpractice” and “medical malpractice lawsuit” are mentioned, visions of patients and their families suffering needlessly are the first that come to mind. However, fellow doctors are just as vulnerable to medical malpractice at the hands of their colleagues.

In 2014, Steven Stuchin, a renowned orthopedic surgeon, became a victim of New York University Langone Medical Center, when he was forced to undergo a battery of assessments, including neurological testing, in a bid to dismiss him from his position. Stuchin, who was 66 years old at the time, had a “stellar” reputation as an experienced doctor at NYU’s Langone Hospital for Joint Diseases and as an associate NYU professor. He claims that he was treated like an “old bag of bones” after two higher-ups decided that he was too old to continue working, despite there being no valid reason.

With more than 1,490 beds and multiple facilities in Bronx residential neighborhoods, Montefiore Medical Center boasts a large presence in NYC. It completes approximately 15,532 inpatient and 13,431 outpatient surgeries each year and is among 38 academic medical centers nationwide to be awarded a prestigious Clinical and Translational Science Award by the National Institutes of Health. However, like all medical institutions, the center is not immune to incidences of medical malpractice, and several medical malpractice lawsuits have been filed against the center in recent years.

Though cases of hospital negligence and malpractice are not as common as other types of medical malpractice, hospitals have a responsibility to both their staff and their patients to provide the best quality and standards of care, as well as a safe and hygienic environment.

Hospitals are required to have several policies and protocols in place, one of which being the hospital’s stance and procedure related to infection control. It is the duty of the hospital to not only establish these protocols but to monitor them consistently to ensure that they are being adhered to. Not doing so can lead to patient injury or even death. 

It was reported that an estimated 1.7 million cases of hospital-acquired infections occurred in the United States in 20

In 2007, Nancy Andrews and her husband sued a Long Island fertility clinic after it was revealed that they had inseminated her with the wrong man’s sperm.

Nancy and her husband approached the New York Services for Reproductive Medicine for in-vitro fertilization treatments after struggling to conceive their second child. Nancy became pregnant soon after and gave birth to a healthy baby girl nine months later. The couple’s joy quickly turned to bewilderment, however, when it became apparent that the girl had markedly darker skin than either of her parents.

In 2017, army veteran Richard Hopkins, aged 65, of Davenport died after developing a post-surgery infection at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City. His family filed a medical malpractice lawsuit in June 2019 against the hospital. His family says that the infection that killed him was caused by medical negligence and that at least 3 other patients in the same hospital suffered similar complications.

The hospital negligence lawsuit centers around the fact that Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City illegally hired a neurosurgeon, John Henry Schneider, who has a history of medical malpractice allegations and whose medical license had been revoked in Wyoming in 2014 due to allegations of poor patient care. The hospital hired Schneider in 2017 at an annual salary of $385,000 despite knowing his past and that there is a federal law stipulating that doctors whose state licenses have been revoked cannot work for the Veterans Affairs hospitals no matter the state that it is in.

In 2008, a woman named Esmin Green died in the waiting room of Brooklyn’s King’s County Hospital Center in full view whilst hospital personnel did nothing to assist her. Ms. Green was a 49-year-old Jamaican immigrant who was admitted to the hospital as a psychiatric patient. She had been waiting for nearly 24 hours in the hospital’s waiting room before collapsing onto the waiting room floor due to a blood clot.

Hospital staff failed to provide basic medical care to Ms. Green and then tried to cover up their neglect. However, the incident was caught on one of the hospital’s cameras. The New York Civil Liberties Union and other lawyers were able to use this footage in a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital for hospital negligence.