Cook County Pays $20 Million After a Toddler's Heart Stopped Unnoticed for Five Minutes Following Routine Surgery at Stroger Hospital
After trial: The $20,000,000 settlement was approved by the Cook County Board of Commissioners on February 5, 2013, and is funded by the county. No appeal; the case resolved before trial.
Won by Schwartz Jambois.
In December 2011 a 2-year-old boy went into cardiac arrest after surgery at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County to repair an undescended testicle. Doctors and nurses did not notice that his heart had stopped for about five minutes before starting CPR. The oxygen loss left him with permanent brain damage; he cannot walk or speak and needs round-the-clock nursing care. On February 5, 2013, the Cook County Board approved a $20 million settlement of the malpractice suit his mother filed, one of the largest in county history. Timothy Ashe represented the family.
What happened
In December 2011 a 2-year-old boy was brought to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, the public hospital on Chicago's Near West Side, for a routine operation to repair an undescended testicle. It is a common pediatric procedure with a short recovery. What happened afterward was not routine. Following the surgery the boy went into cardiac arrest, and the doctors and nurses in attendance did not notice that his heart had stopped. Roughly five minutes passed before anyone began cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Five minutes without circulation is a long time for a toddler's brain. A child under anesthesia in a recovery setting is supposed to be on continuous monitoring precisely so that a stopped heart is caught within seconds and resuscitation starts at once; here the alarm, the recognition and the response all came late. The staff revived him, but the oxygen deprivation caused extensive and irreversible brain damage. According to the family's lawyer, the boy cannot walk or speak, is incontinent, is fed through a tube, is visually impaired and needs nursing care around the clock. He will need that level of care for the rest of his life.
His mother, Justine Francique, filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Cook County, which operates Stroger Hospital, in the Circuit Court of Cook County. Timothy Ashe of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz (now Schwartz Jambois) handled the case. The claim was straightforward: a hospital that has just put a small child under anesthesia has to monitor him closely enough to know within seconds, not minutes, when his heart stops.
The county, which self-insures its public hospital system through its own budget, did not take the case to trial. On February 5, 2013, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved a $20 million settlement, which local reporters described as one of the largest in county history. Board President Toni Preckwinkle said disciplinary action had been taken against a number of the individuals involved, and that the county health system's chief executive, Dr. Ram Raju, had put measures in place to prevent a repeat. The settlement was structured to fund the boy's care for the rest of his life. The county board approved a further $4 million in other settlements the same day.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.CBS Chicago, February 5, 2013: Cook County Board approval of the $20 million settlement, December 2011 surgery at Stroger Hospital to repair an undescended testicle, five-minute delay before CPR, permanent brain damage, Preckwinkle's statement on discipline and preventive measures
- 2.Downers Grove Patch, March 6, 2013: Timothy Ashe as the family's attorney, settlement described as one of the largest in Cook County history, the boy's condition (cannot walk or speak, tube-fed, visually impaired, round-the-clock nursing care), settlement to fund lifelong care
- 3.Kreisman Law Offices blog, 2013: February 5, 2013 approval, staff failed to notice the cardiac arrest and delayed CPR about five minutes, mother Justine Francique as plaintiff
- 4.Schwartz Jambois (firm)
More proven verdicts from Schwartz Jambois
All Schwartz Jambois proven verdicts →A woman 39 weeks pregnant with her first child arrived at MacNeal Hospital in labor. Eleven hours in, the fetal heart tracing showed distress and meconium appeared in the amniotic fluid, but the obstetrician let labor run another four and a half hours and gave Pitocin to speed it up even as the baby's heart rate decelerated. The newborn girl aspirated meconium, suffered lung damage and respiratory failure, and died 18 days later. In 2018 a Cook County jury returned a $19,217,602 verdict against the obstetrician, a nurse and the hospital in Estate of Padilla v. Porto, No. 13 L 6693, tried by Craig Mannarino and Amanda Brasfield. TopVerdict ranked it the tenth-largest Illinois verdict of 2018.
On March 8, 2003, Chicago police officer Alvin Weems shot 23-year-old Michael Pleasance in the head at the 95th Street Red Line station while trying to break up a fight in which Pleasance was only a bystander. CTA surveillance video contradicted the officer's claim that Pleasance lunged for his gun, and the City admitted liability, so the May 2007 trial was on damages alone. A Cook County jury awarded his mother $12.5 million for loss of society. The Illinois Appellate Court reversed in December 2009 over prejudicial closing arguments and a jury instruction, and the City settled for $3 million in March 2011.
Five days after a radical prostatectomy at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center in Mattoon in August 2003, Clinton Dean Lovell was admitted with constipation. A physician ordered an enema only if Lovell's urologist approved; a nurse skipped that step and had an aide give a tap-water enema, which tore open the freshly sutured area and created a fistula between his rectum and bladder. Lovell went through a colostomy, a bladder catheter, fistula repair, colostomy reversal and an artificial urinary sphincter, and was left permanently incontinent. The hospital admitted negligence but blamed the surgery for the fistula. In September 2008 a Coles County jury awarded $2,378,258, and the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed in January 2010.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.