According to the Daily Local News, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, a court awarded the family of a young girl $32.8 million last month after she was born with brain damage at the Phoenixville Hospital.
The court reportedly found that two nurses were negligent while attending to the girl’s pregnant mother during her birth. According to the paper, the girl, Lily Ciechoski, suffers from spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
A jury reportedly found that the nurses “improperly failed to alert the girl’s mother’s doctor about a drastic change in the baby’s heart rate for 13 minutes during labor.” The delays led the baby to suffer brain damage.
On November 14, 2009, Lily’s mother, Leslie Proffitt of North Coventry, was admitted to the hospital for her delivery. She reportedly did not have any concerns about the delivery and was near her due date. The following day, the baby’s heart rate dropped significantly, from about 150 beats per minute, which is normal, to about 60 beats per minute.
The attorney representing the victims told the paper that it is likely that her heart rate dropped because oxygen to her brain had been blocked by a kink in her umbilical cord. The two nurses attending to Proffitt noticed the drop in heart rate, but did not tell her doctor about the change. About 13 minutes later, the doctor entered the room, noticed the change and immediately asked the nurses to “notify their supervisor and get an anesthesiologist so that she could perform an emergency cesarean section delivery.”
However, a supervisor was not contacted until 1:29 a.m., and an anesthesiologist was not located until 1:36 a.m. Lily was reportedly delivered at 1:49 a.m.
“The $32.8 million awarded by the jury is thought to be among the largest ever awarded in Chester County, which has a reputation as a jurisdiction not very hospitable to medical malpractice cases,” the Daily Local News reported. “It is similar to the $78.5 million verdict handed down by a Philadelphia jury against Pottstown Memorial Medical Center in 2012 for a similarly-delayed delivery of a baby who suffered brain damage, much like Lily.”
In both cases, the hospitals are owned by Community Health Systems of Franklin, Tenn., which operates 125 hospitals in 29 states.
Need a Birth Injury Attorney?
As we have been blogging about recently, the failure to order a caesarian section delivery by a medical provider can have terrible repercussions on a baby. Birth injuries resulting from the failure to order this procedure in a timely manner include deformities, brain damage, cerebral palsy, erb’s palsy and shoulder dystocia.
As in Lily’s case, cerebral palsy is often caused right before or during delivery if the fetus does not receive enough oxygen. This horrible birth injury results in intellectual limitations, hearing deficits, vision impairment, behavioral problems, seizures, speaking difficulties and learning disabilities. All of these issues require extended therapy and rehabilitation.
Please contact the birth injury attorneys at our firm immediately if your son or daughter is suffering from cerebral palsy because of a healthcare provider’s negligence, so that we may advise you of your legal rights. You can meet with our birth injury attorneys to see what options are available to you. For more information, call our firm at 1 (800) 460-0606 to schedule a free consultation.
[Did You Know: As a nation, the direct medical cost to treat cerebral palsy victims each year is about $1.175 billion.]
Cappolino Dodd Krebs LLP – Birth Injury Attorneys
