Case Closed, Episode 3: When Care Falls Short

Hi my name is Damien Smith from Duffy & Duffy, and I want to tell you about a recent trial I had in Nassau County where I represented a 94 year old woman who was living in an assisted living facility.

The resident ended up having some functional decline and she experienced some falls in the facility. [There was] one fall which really triggered a change in her condition. The case was against her primary care physician who had an office in the facility. The doctor did not make any determination of what was the cause of the fall and did not even investigate what happened with regards to the fall. After this fall she remained in the facility under the doctor’s care and then the patient suffered a catastrophic fall in which she broke her hip and was never able to walk again.

When this patient had a fall where there was certainly a change in her condition that should have triggered the doctor to perform an evaluation and an investigation, the doctor’s records really showed that she didn’t even know that the patient had fallen, even though that was the reason why she was being taken to the doctor in the first place. So the doctor refused to take responsibility for her care and treatment of our client, refused to consent to even settle the case, so we had to go to trial on the case.

The biggest challenge in court was to convince the jury that the doctor did have responsibility for this patient because obviously the doctor wasn’t there when the patient fell, was not responsible for the actual fall, it was that the doctor was responsible for the patient actually being in this facility in the first place. There was a point in the trial during cross- examination of the doctor where the doctor was trying to give some testimony that she did some type of investigation to find out whether or not the patient had fallen in the facility. However, I could tell that she wasn’t telling the truth and was able to expose the fact that she did not in fact do any investigation trying to find out whether or not the patient had fallen. And I think the jury saw through that.

We were very happy that we were able to convince the jury that the doctor was in fact responsible for our client being in the assisted living facility and provided a verdict of $500,000 for the family of our client. Obviously our client was very pleased with the result of the jury verdict and we hope that the doctor will take a different approach in the practice of medicine in the future.