OTLA Trial Lawyer Summer 2021

12 Trial Lawyer • Summer 2021 Patrick Angel By Patrick Angel OTLA Guardian S hortly after 1 a.m., a nurse in the orthopedics unit walked into room 306 and administered IV pain medica- tion to the 52-year-old woman who had earlier undergone a total knee replace- ment. The patient asked the nurse to help her to the bathroom and the nurse did. The RN then left, telling the patient to use the call button when she finished if she needed help back to her bed. Sometime later, the patient opened her eyes to find herself on the floor look- ing up at the ceiling of her dimly lit hospital room. After only a moment, she drifted off again and when she came to she saw three or four people huddled over her. They seemed to be talking to her but she wasn’t sure what they were saying. Her head hurt. “Do you know why you’re here in the hospital?” “No,” the patient said, confused. “Do you remember having surgery on your knee?” “What? No. Surgery?” Because of her disorientation and being discovered unresponsive, she was diagnosed with a concussion and kept an additional day in the hospital for obser- vation. A CT scan the morning after her fall did not reveal any evidence of struc- tural damage like a skull fracture or bleeding. Months later, Faun Patzer’s knee had healed wonderfully, but her brain had not. She was not able to return to work as a firefighter/paramedic. She had memory problems, fatigue, speech prob- lems, visual problems similar to vertigo, balance problems, headaches and depres- sion. She would call her spouse in tears because she couldn’t remember the route home from the Safeway that was a mile and a half from their house, the grocery store where she had shopped for over a year. We filed this lawsuit arguing the hospital staff did not accurately assess Patzer’s fall risk. And if they had, they’d have realized she was at high risk for fall- ing and would have made sure she was assisted safely back to her hospital bed instead of being left unattended. The level of a patient’s risk for falling determines the level of assistance and supervision a patient requires. The hospital in our case made no of- fers to settle, arguing the nurses’ care was appropriate in all instances. Furthermore, they argued, Patzer did not have a brain injury, if she did suffer a concussion (mTBI) it certainly resolved, and she was making up her symptoms for money or, at the very least, grossly exaggerating them. The decision to go to trial in this case was an easy one, and one made for us by the defendant. We went to trial in the summer of 2019. The 10 day trial was presented to a Multnomah County jury and presided over by Judge Leslie Bottomly. Attorneys from Hart Wagner aggressively and pro- fessionally defended the case but the jury astutely returned a verdict in favor of the LITIGATING HOSPITAL FALLS