On July 2, 2018, after a two-week trial and two-and-a-half hours of deliberation, a jury in Michigan awarded $135 million to the family of a 10-year-old girl who was left paralyzed after a 2011 spine surgery to treat her scoliosis.
According to Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney for Faith DeGrand, this is the largest single medical malpractice verdict in U.S. history.
Lawyers for Detroit Medical Center are vowing to appeal.
The lawsuit was filed in 2013.
Doctors Ignored Warning Signs
DeGrand’s lawyers told the jury that DMC’s doctors ignored signs that the hardware implanted along her spine was causing her intense pain and further injury. They further told the jury that instead of providing DeGrand compression, Eric Jones, M.D., the surgeon named in the suit, took two vacations and that DMC waited an additional ten days before having the devices removed by physician. That delay, said Fieger, contributed to DeGrand’s paralysis.
During DeGrand’s surgery, Fieger said in a television interview, “the surgeon inserted rods and screws to straighten her spine, which was fine…however, the way the surgeon inserted them caused compression of her spinal cord, resulting in numbness in Faith’s arms and legs.”
He added that when a scoliosis surgery is performed, “the patient needs to have screws and hooks and bars taken out immediately.”
In a statement issued after the trial, Fieger said, “Instead of relieving the compression of her spinal cord, Faith’s doctor went on vacation two times, and left her alone lying paralyzed, and incontinent of bowel and bladder for 10 days until another doctor recognized her serious condition and took out all of the hardware which was causing her paralysis.”
But by then Fieger said it was too late. “Faith was left with permanent quadriparesis of her four extremities and permanent loss of bowel and bladder control.”
DeGrand was unable to walk and had to use a wheelchair for more than a year.
Fieger said the defense was “mind boggling.” He accused the hospital of falsely claiming “that a phantom blood clot, that no doctor ever saw, was the cause of Faith’s injuries, and that there was nothing they could do to prevent it.”
He added, “there were no MRIs or anything that would indicate that. They literally made this up to go to trial.”
Hospital representatives reportedly said they disagreed with the verdict and were considering an appeal.
Medical Malpractice
To put this award into perspective, the rate of paid medical malpractice claims in the U.S. has declined significantly, dropping nearly 56% between 1992 and 2014, according to a review of the National Practitioner Data Bank published in 2017 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Of more than 280,000 paid claims, about 8% topped $1 million in 2009-2014, and nearly one-third involved a patient death.
