Suing a bad hospital?

meglome

My brother fell off a ladder while working at a location in the next county. He should have had another guy with him but he was taken away to work somewhere else for a week. He’d taken the cover off the item he was fixing and hung it on the top of the ladder. When the ladder slipped he came down on top of it and the metal box hit him in the face. He cut his head from above the left eye, next to the top of his nose up across his forehead. Passer-bys picked him up and he drove off to the nearest big hospital, he wasn’t dizzy and it was only a cut (or so he thought).
So at the hospital they take x-rays and stitch him up. After being stitched up he was very sick but after five hours in this hospital they told him he could go home. No pain killers, no letter for work, no nothing. So he drives off home. They have told him it’s okay to drive and to take the flight he has booked two days later.
The next morning my mother gets a call at the family home. It’s from the hospital looking for my brother, this is strange as my bother didn’t give them the number or address as he has his own house so no reason to – he gave them his own mobile and address. As my father and brother have the same name my mother assumes they are looking for my father, my brother hadn’t even mentioned the incident. The hospital gets my fathers mobile number and rings him. He quickly realises they are looking for my brother and offers to get him to call the hospital. Our family name is rare and my fathers name is in the book so it’s obvious they have looked the number up in the phone book but they don’t seem to have my brother number at all, they think this may be my brothers’ number. After a few hours he calls the hospital and they tell him there is a dark anomaly on his x-rays so can he go back to the hospital. That afternoon he heads back to the hospital (in the next county) and at this point they do a cat scan. He waits around for a few more hours while they are checking the cat scan results. They tell him to go home again, he’s fine to drive but can he go down to James’s Hospital in Dublin the following morning for an appointment. He goes home again. A couple of hours after he gets home they call him (at the correct number this time) and tell him to get back to the hospital immediately and don’t drive. His partner drives him back to the hospital and he’s put straight into an ambulance and sent to Beaumont. To cut a long story short he has a fractured skull and bits of his nasal bone have broken off and are sitting next to his brain. He can actually hear a bubbling sound which in Beaumont they tell him is the air getting into his skull through the break. So driving is not a good idea, any kind of a bump on the head might be lethal and taking a flight would be a really terrible idea.
In the end they have to cut the top of his skull off, take the bits of bone out and use titanium to fix the damage. In Beaumont they are brilliant and their actions cannot be faulted but this other hospital could have caused his death. In Beaumont they wouldn't even let him out of the ward. At the other hospital they sent him home twice after x-rays and a cat scan. He has no real interest in suing his employer but he’d like to go after this other hospital as they are obviously not terribly competent and we believe they’ll do it to someone else. One thing I will say this particular hospital has a bad name, we didn't realise this at the time but we’ve heard some bad first hand stories since. What do you think?

meglome

A guy I know and his girlfriend were in an accident, this is a first hand story btw. A guy went through a stop sign and ran into them. It was pretty bad and they both needed operations. His girlfriend had internal bleeding but was too seriously hurt initally to be operated on. So after a few day her relative came in who's a matron in another hospital and pointed out that he tongue was white and this meant she was bleeding out to the point of dying. The hospital said she was fine and there was nothing to worry about but her relative got on the phone and used her contacts to have her moved to another hospital. It turned out the relative was correct and had she been left there for several more hours she may have died.

This is the same hospital that I mention in the post above. So has anyone any advice or has heard of anyone taking an action like this against a hospital?

dermot_sheehan

To sue in negligence he needs to show he has suffered damage as a result of the hospital's negligence.

In this case there doesnt appear to be any damage as a result of the hospital's actions. Any damage that arose to him was as a result of the fall.

meglome

gabhain7 wrote:

To sue in negligence he needs to show he has suffered damage as a result of the hospital's negligence.

In this case there doesnt appear to be any damage as a result of the hospital's actions. Any damage that arose to him was as a result of the fall.

Fair enough. It is a shame though that this hospitals actions could have killed him although you're correct they ultimately didn't make things any worse. Anyone got any ideas about even reporting their actions to the press or HSE?

Victor

meglome wrote:

Fair enough. It is a shame though that this hospitals actions could have killed him although you're correct they ultimately didn't make things any worse. Anyone got any ideas about even reporting their actions to the press or HSE?

I think your first port of call should be the perhaps contact with solicitor follow by a complaint tot he hospital and the Medical Council. http://www.medicalcouncil.ie/

haz

Victor wrote:

I think your first port of call should be the perhaps contact with solicitor follow by a complaint tot he hospital and the Medical Council. http://www.medicalcouncil.ie/

Buttering the lawyers' toast is fine, but the first port of call should be a radiologist or medic with recent A&E experience (any young doctor) to get an impartial opinion on whether there is anything to complain about.

In my humble opinion, if the patient was treated for a cut, showed all signs of being well and went back to work, then there was no reason to suspect anything more serious. It sounds like the later review of the X-ray revealed an anomaly that was difficult to assess even on the CAT scan. Maybe they missed something that should have been spotted, but probably not. The end result is that the fracture was treated, but the benefit of hindsight suggests it could have been treated earlier - there is no loss or harm.

I would also expect most medics to be defensive of their discipline. Finding an opinion of negligence would be tough.