$12 Million Verdict Over a Perforated Colon During Hernia Surgery, Affirmed by the Connecticut Supreme Court

Vivian Gagliano went to Danbury Hospital for a hernia repair, a common procedure with a well-established recovery path. Instead, her colon was perforated during the surgery, an injury that turns a routine outpatient repair into a life-threatening complication requiring emergency intervention and a much longer, more painful recovery.

Gagliano and her husband, Philip, sued, alleging the surgery was performed negligently. At trial, a central issue was who was actually responsible for the surgical resident who performed the procedure under supervision from a member of the hospital's clinical faculty. Danbury Hospital argued it should not be held liable for a resident's conduct; the Gaglianos argued the resident was effectively acting as the hospital's agent when he performed the surgery, meaning the hospital shared responsibility for what happened to her.

In May 2014, a six-member jury deliberated for roughly four hours before finding the surgical team negligent. The jury awarded Vivian Gagliano $902,985.04 in economic damages, covering her medical bills and the cost of the additional surgery to repair the perforation, and $9.6 million in non-economic damages for what she went through. Philip Gagliano was separately awarded $1.5 million for loss of consortium, damages tied to the toll his wife's injury took on their marriage. The jury apportioned 80 percent of the fault to the resident and the hospital together, bringing the total verdict to roughly $12 million.

Danbury Hospital appealed, and the case went through the Connecticut Appellate Court before landing at the Connecticut Supreme Court, where the central legal question was whether a hospital can be held vicariously liable for a resident physician's negligence when that resident is supervised by hospital-affiliated clinical faculty, even though the resident is technically employed by a separate teaching program rather than by the hospital directly. This is a recurring issue in teaching hospitals, where residents rotate through supervised training but a patient has no way of knowing, and often no reason to ask, whether the doctor performing their surgery is a hospital employee, a faculty member, or a resident answering to both.

On August 10, 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled for the Gaglianos. It held there was sufficient evidence for the jury to have reasonably found the resident was acting as an actual agent of Danbury Hospital when he performed the surgery, and it let the roughly $12 million verdict stand. Joshua D. Koskoff represented the Gaglianos on appeal.

The ruling mattered to patients well beyond this one case, because it addressed a gap that teaching hospitals had sometimes used to limit their own liability: the argument that a resident's employer, not the hospital where the surgery actually took place, bears responsibility when something goes wrong. The Connecticut Supreme Court's decision made clear that a hospital cannot necessarily use that structure to insulate itself, if the facts show the hospital's own faculty was supervising the resident's work.