Illinois hospitals and doctors may be well aware of the physical and emotional damage they can cause patients and families to suffer if a mistake is made during surgery or if medical equipment is not properly sanitized. But something as simple as failing to make sure that medical staff receive proper instructions for a patient’s rehabilitation plan can also result in serious and costly consequences.
Last month, a lawsuit was filed against an Illinois hospital and two St. Clair County doctors after a patient was injured while recovering from an injury during rehabilitation. The lawsuit is seeking a minimum of $150,000 in damages. The lawsuit states that hospital negligence and doctors’ errors prevented important instructions about the patient’s rehabilitation plan from being properly communicated to those who cared for the patient during her rehabilitation.
The patient injured as a result of the alleged negligence has since died, but the patient’s daughter and executor of her estate is moving forward with the lawsuit on the patient’s behalf. According to the lawsuit, the woman’s mother was treated at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Illinois for an injury in December 2008. The doctor who treated the woman wrote specific instructions for the woman’s rehabilitation plan, including which exercises the woman was to avoid in order to successfully recover from her injury.
However, those instructions were not communicated properly when the woman was transferred to an inpatient rehabilitation center. During rehab, the patient was re-injured and broke her right leg. As a result of the injury, the patient needed to be admitted to a nursing home so that she could receive additional care for her medical condition. The woman’s daughter said that her mother was never well enough to leave the nursing home and died in 2011. Had her mother been provided the correct assistance during rehabilitation, she would have never suffered further injuries and may have never needed additional medical care after her initial injury.
Source: The Madison St. Clair Record, “Doctors and hospital accused of causing patient to be re-injured during rehab,” Andrea Dearden, Feb. 23, 2012
