Eric Johnson again successfully defended his clients, the Emergency Department and nursing staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital, in a seven-day Jefferson County Supreme Court trial where the plaintiff claimed that the Emergency Department staff and co-defendant physician improperly delayed the assessment and treatment of the plaintiff’s husband who suffered from an ascending aortic dissection, which ruptured and caused the husband’s death two days later. The plaintiff claimed that when her then 52-year-old husband was taken to the St. Joe’s Emergency Department in February 2021 with a sudden onset of chest pain which radiated to his shoulder and back, the Emergency Department staff should have seen the patient and completed an EKG within 10 minutes of his arrival and should have triaged him at an ESI level which would have gotten him seen and assessed by an Emergency Department MD within 10 minutes. The plaintiff further claimed that had that timeline been met, the co-defendant Emergency Department MD (who never saw the patient) would have seen and assessed him as having an acute aortic dissection and would have then gotten the patient to the OR for surgical repair before his aorta ruptured, which resulted in his death. The plaintiff claimed conscious pain and suffering and wrongful death damages.
In defending the case, Johnson proved that given the circumstances of the Emergency Department at the time, which included a crowd of other patients with high acuity and emergent needs, the time within which the patient was seen and assessed by the Emergency Department staff was appropriate, and that given the patient’s presenting signs and symptoms and evidence of stability, he was properly triaged. The defendants further proved that malperfusion syndrome, a complication of the patient’s aortic dissection and not the rupture of the aorta, was the cause of the patient’s death, which would have occurred regardless of the timing of the surgery.
After deliberating for only 20 minutes, the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the defendants.
