Cook County Jury Awards $3.2 Million After Hospital Transfer Form Lists Kidney-Toxic Antibiotic
After trial: The Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, affirmed the hospital's liability on May 4, 2007 (modified May 25, 2007) and remanded for a new trial on past and future medical expenses only, because the trial court had excluded the plaintiff's expert on dialysis charges. The $3.2 million verdict is shown as the amount that stood at trial.
Won by Hurley McKenna & Mertz, P.C..
A Cook County jury awarded Betty Kunz $3.2 million in 2005 after finding Little Company of Mary Hospital liable for a nurse's error that put the kidney-toxic antibiotic gentamicin on her nursing-home transfer form when she was 75. She suffered permanent kidney failure and needs dialysis for life. The jury cleared the nursing home's doctor and the other defendants. In 2007 the Appellate Court affirmed liability and ordered a new trial limited to past and future medical expenses.
What happened
Betty Kunz was 75 when she entered Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois, on June 7, 2000. Two weeks earlier she had a total right knee replacement, and the joint had become infected with MRSA, a staph strain that resists most antibiotics. An infectious disease specialist, Dr. David Beezhold, started her on three drugs, including gentamicin, and planned to stop the gentamicin before she left the hospital because it can damage the kidneys. Tests showed her kidneys were working normally.
She was discharged around 9 p.m. on June 10 to the Manor Care nursing home in Palos Heights for rehabilitation. The transfer form that went with her did not follow Dr. Beezhold's plan. It listed gentamicin, 120 milligrams by IV every 12 hours, with the next dose due that night. The hospital nurse who drafted the medication section, Halina Ciezkowski, had spoken by phone with Dr. Russell Petrak, Dr. Beezhold's partner, to get the discharge orders. Dr. Petrak testified he would have ordered gentamicin only if told it was part of Dr. Beezhold's plan, and that he must have been misinformed.
The nursing home relied on the form. Its attending physician, Dr. Jue-Lin Tang, prescribed gentamicin on the strength of the transfer paperwork, and Kunz kept receiving it until the afternoon of June 14. She had trouble urinating by June 13, and her creatinine levels rose on June 14 and again the next day. On June 15 she was diagnosed with acute renal failure.
Kunz sued the hospital, Dr. Tang, the infectious disease practice and Manor Care in 2002. Christopher Hurley and Mark McKenna of Hurley McKenna & Mertz represented her. Two kidney and infectious disease experts testified that the prolonged gentamicin caused permanent kidney failure and that she would need dialysis for the rest of her life. A nursing expert testified that listing the drug on the form fell below the standard of care. Her MRSA infection did clear, and she went home, but she now needs dialysis three times a week.
The case was tried in the Circuit Court of Cook County, where the hospital argued that the error was not its nurse's doing. In 2005 the jury found the hospital liable through its nurse and awarded Kunz $3.2 million. It cleared Dr. Tang and the other defendants, so the hospital alone answered for the harm.
Both sides appealed. On May 4, 2007, the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, rejected the hospital's request for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, holding that the evidence let the jury infer that the nurse's error caused the injury, and it denied the hospital a new trial. Kunz won a partial reversal: the trial court should have let her nephrologist testify that her past and future dialysis charges were reasonable, so the court sent the case back for a new trial limited to past and future medical expenses. The court filed a modified opinion on May 25, 2007.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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