$23.9 Million Kitsap County Birth Injury Verdict Against Jefferson Healthcare

In 2014, a Port Townsend family went to Jefferson Healthcare Medical Center for the birth of their daughter. The hospital is operated by Jefferson County Public Hospital District.

During labor the child's umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, restricting the oxygen reaching her brain. The staff had an electronic fetal heart monitor in place, which is the instrument that exists to catch exactly that. For roughly the final three hours before delivery, the monitor was picking up the mother's heartbeat rather than the baby's, and nobody on the labor and delivery team recognized it. The tracing looked reassuring because it was not the baby's tracing.

The child was born unresponsive and required extensive resuscitation to breathe on her own. She began seizing within about half a day of birth. The brain damage was permanent. She has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, cognitive impairment, and speech, language, and motor deficits, and she needs care around the clock. By the time of trial, at nearly six years old, her developmental abilities were those of a child of twelve to eighteen months.

The family sued the hospital district. The case was originally filed and worked up by Christopher P. Yuhl of Yuhl Carr in California, who brought in the Luvera Law Firm of Seattle as co-counsel to try it. A first trial ended in a mistrial. The case was retried in Kitsap County Superior Court, with Robert Gellatly of Luvera serving as lead trial lawyer.

The theory the jury accepted was straightforward: doctors and nurses missed a series of signals that the baby was in distress, and the central failure was not recognizing that the monitor they were relying on was tracking the wrong heart. The hospital contested liability.

On December 20, 2019, the jury returned a verdict of $23.9 million against the hospital district. Jefferson Healthcare announced it would appeal.

It did. On January 4, 2022, Division II of the Washington Court of Appeals issued a unanimous unpublished opinion rejecting every ground the hospital raised, six in all, and affirmed the judgment. The panel was Judges Bradley Maxa, Anne Cruser, and Bernard Veljacik. No petition for review was filed with the Washington Supreme Court.

With accrued interest the judgment came to roughly $25.5 million, and it was paid in full by the hospital district's insurance carrier. The money is in a structure meant to fund a lifetime of care for a child who will need it every day of that lifetime.