Appellate Court Reinstates $9.6 Million Judgment For Newborn Injured By Hospital's Monitoring Failures
After trial: The reduction from $10,944,000 to $9,644,000 was a credit for the $1,300,000 the family had already recovered from other defendants, not a damages cap. No statutory cap on damages constrained this verdict: the claim arose in 1986, and the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the state's 1995 tort reform act as unconstitutional in Best v. Taylor Machine Works in December 1997. The trial court's judgment notwithstanding the verdict was reversed on appeal and the judgment reinstated; no appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court following the June 30, 2000, decision was found. Whether Lake Forest Hospital ultimately paid, and whether payment came through insurance, is not confirmed in the public record. Timothy W. Heath was counsel of record in this case while practicing at Hegarty & Heath, the Chicago firm where he worked before Heath & Heath, P.C.
Won by Heath & Heath, P.C..
A Cook County jury awarded $10,944,000 in 1997 to a newborn girl left with extreme and permanent neurological damage after Lake Forest Hospital failed to provide any mechanism for getting a description of her placenta into her chart and had no policy for monitoring the blood pressure of stressed newborns, delaying treatment for blood she had lost before delivery. The trial court reduced the verdict to $9,644,000 to credit a prior $1,300,000 settlement with other defendants, then wiped out the award entirely by granting the hospital judgment notwithstanding the verdict and ordering a new trial. In June 2000, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed both rulings, reinstated the $9,644,000 judgment, and denied the hospital's conditional request to cut the award further. Terrence K. Hegarty, William J. Harte, Timothy W. Heath and Joan M. Nannix represented the family; Heath is now a named partner at Heath & Heath, P.C.
What happened
A baby girl was born on August 28, 1986, at Lake Forest Hospital in Lake Forest, Illinois, by emergency cesarean section after her mother began bleeding heavily. The pathology report on the placenta, typed up and placed in the baby's chart two days later, showed a velamentous insertion of the umbilical cord, a condition in which the cord's blood vessels run unprotected through the membranes of the placenta rather than into the placenta itself. One of those exposed vessels had ruptured, and the blood the obstetrician saw was the baby's own. She had lost a substantial amount of it before anyone knew.
The obstetrician sent the placenta to the lab without describing it to anyone, and the hospital had no mechanism to get that description into the baby's chart, which state regulation required. She was taken to the hospital's level 2 nursery for respiratory distress. That nursery had no suitable newborn blood pressure equipment and no policy requiring that the blood pressure of a stressed newborn be checked, so none was ordered or taken. A transport team from Evanston Hospital's level 3 nursery, called in between 10:40 a.m. and 11 a.m., did not arrive until about 1:30 p.m. The team took her blood pressure, found it below normal, and immediately started a blood transfusion.
She was treated at Evanston Hospital for circulatory, liver and kidney problems caused by the blood loss, and nursery staff there noted problems with her tone, her sucking reflex, and the growth of her head circumference. The damage was extreme and permanent.
The family, through the child's court-appointed conservator, Central Trust Bank, sued the hospital for medical malpractice in the Circuit Court of Cook County. Trial began on April 30, 1997. After two weeks and testimony from 27 witnesses, the jury returned a general verdict of $10,944,000, and judgment was entered on it on May 14, 1997. Days later the trial court reduced that judgment to $9,644,000 to credit a $1,300,000 settlement the family had already reached with other defendants in the case.
The hospital did not accept the result. On August 26, 1997, the trial judge granted its motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and, in the alternative, ordered a new trial, wiping out the jury's award entirely.
The family appealed. On June 30, 2000, the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, reversed the trial court on both rulings, holding that the evidence did not so overwhelmingly favor the hospital that no contrary verdict could stand. The panel reinstated the judgment and rejected the hospital's conditional cross-appeal for a remittitur, finding the request had no foundation.
Terrence K. Hegarty, William J. Harte, Timothy W. Heath and Joan M. Nannix, of Hegarty & Heath and William J. Harte, Ltd., are the counsel of record named in the opinion for the family. Timothy Heath now practices as a named partner at Heath & Heath, P.C. No further appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court was found in the case record.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Illinois Appellate Court, First District, opinion filed 2000-06-30 in Suttle v. Lake Forest Hospital: establishes the $10,944,000 jury verdict, the nunc pro tunc reduction to $9,644,000 for a $1,300,000 settlement credit, the trial court's JNOV and new-trial order of 1997-08-26, and the appellate court's reversal reinstating the verdict.
- 2.FindLaw, mirror of the same Appellate Court of Illinois opinion (315 Ill. App. 3d 96, 733 N.E.2d 726): prints the counsel-of-record block naming Hegarty & Heath and William J. Harte, Ltd. (Terrence K. Hegarty, William J. Harte, Timothy W. Heath and Joan M. Nannix) for the plaintiff-appellant, and confirms the appellate court's denial of the hospital's remittitur cross-appeal.
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