Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from INTENSIVECAREHOTLINE.COM where we instantly improve the lives for Families of critically ill Patients in Intensive Care, so that you can make informed decisions, have PEACE OF MIND, real power, real control and so that you can influence decision making fast, even if
you’re not a doctor or a nurse in Intensive Care!
This is another episode of “YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED“ and in last week’s episode I answered another question from our readers and the question was
My Mom Died in ICU Because of Medical Negligence. Why Does the ICU Team Withhold Information in my Mom’s Medical Record?
You can check out last week’s question by clicking on the link here.
In this week’s episode of “YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED” I want to answer questions from one of my clients Bea, as part of my 1:1 consulting and advocacy service! Bea’s mother died in ICU because
of medical negligence and Bea is asking how can she get clinical evidence to know where the medical negligence is?
My Mom Died in ICU. How Can I Get Clinical Evidence Where the Medical Negligence Is? Please Help!
“You can also check out previous 1:1 consulting and advocacy sessions with me and Bea here.”
Part 1
Part 2
Patrik: Yeah. You know what you can do, no, no much easier. Take pictures with your mobile phone and email them to me.
Bea: That’s too much. Too many.
Patrik: Well, I look, I don’t know. I take pictures all the time of records and stuff.
Bea: That’s way too many pages. Too many. Too many.
Patrik: Okay, all right. Up to you. Up to you.
Bea: But here’s the thing. I don’t understand this, acute respiratory failure. You probably when you see it you know.
Patrik: I would have to see, that’s all right. Carry on, carry on.
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Bea: And then next one is PEA.
Patrik: Say that again, PEA?
Bea: PEA cardio arrest.
Patrik: Okay, she had a PEA. Yeah, she had a PA.
Bea: PEA.
Patrik: A pulmonary embolus probably.
Bea: Yeah. How did they know she had an apnea test on the 21st? That’s interesting because the apnea test was not taken until the 22nd in the morning according to the record.
Patrik: Right, right. And do you have a report of that apnea test?
Bea: No, no.
Patrik: Those are the missing links.
Bea: Yes.
Patrik: Those are the missing links.
Patrik: I would have to see that. I would have to see that. So, what has your lawyer done to this point?
Bea: They’re just gathering info-
Patrik: Information. Right, right.
Bea: They get a draft already for the trial next week.
Patrik: Right, right. And what’s your end goal? Is it a lawsuit against individuals? Is it a lawsuit against the hospital? What’s your end goal?
Bea: According to the attorney they want to file against the hospital, including all nurses and a few doctors. I’m not sure is that appropriate or not?
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Patrik: Well-
Bea: And second of all-
Patrik: Yeah, I’ll tell you what you could do, for example, if you wanted to go after individuals, you could report a nurse, for example, you could report to the Nurse’s Registration Board. A doctor, you could report to the Medical Registration Board.
They could potentially lose their registration, right? That’s something your lawyer needs to answer for you what the best course of action is, whether you should go after the hospital or after individuals.
Patrik: That question, I can’t answer you because that’s where the lawyer is the expert on. What I can help you with is get the evidence for what has happened and where the medical negligence is and then you and your lawyer need to decide do you want to go after the individuals or do you want to go after an organization?
Bea: Organization for sure. But I think the nurses, some of them it’s covered with insurance.
Patrik: No, yeah but not if they deliberately go against their code of conduct, for example. Code of conduct means if they’re killing somebody against medical advice or they’re killing somebody against, what’s the word? Without consent. You could sue somebody for murder.
Bea: Can you?
Patrik: Oh, well I mean okay, I’ll give you an example. I still do like one shift a month in ICU. I still do that, right? So, if I go into ICU and I look after a patient and I stop certain treatments, which I could, and the patient dies, I deliberately kill a person and that’s murder.
Bea: Well, that’s what the other person said. She said they murdered.
Patrik: Right, right.
Bea: She was there when the doctor called me. So, she witnessed that too.
Patrik: Yeah, so to me-
Bea: And the doctor called me and informed me that. And the doctor also talked to another doctor, which is a dialysis doctor, basically said bad words about me. He said I was wacko. And then just stuff like the treatment is likely to kill her. Meaning get rid of her. Meaning get rid of my mother and get rid of me as well.
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Patrik: Was there anybody, you or anybody else within your family, who witnessed your mother’s death? Was there anybody in there from the family that was a witness?
Bea: No.
Patrik: Right, right.
Bea: We witnessed only in ICU. But also, I’m telling you because I wasn’t there, they performed an apnea test, but that was supposed to be on the 22nd, not 21st.
On the 21st they said they performed the apnea test positive. No test was performed.
Patrik: Right. Okay.
Bea: Interesting.
Patrik: It is interesting, it is very interesting. I really think you need to get the remaining medical records. That’s going to be your missing link.
Bea: Yeah. I do want you to take a look at it. I think it’s very important to see. I’ll try to contact you to see if maybe I can mail it to you.
Patrik: I think the easiest way to get the medical records is for you is to take images of them and send them to me in an email that I believe it’s the quickest way.
Bea: Way too much. Too many here.
Patrik: Yeah, okay sure.
Bea: You can tell me what is the mailing address? I can send. I will do that, but I only can give you a portion of it. The other person I don’t have.
Patrik: Right, right.
Bea: We need record for the … Okay, now that’s my other portion of the question.
We’re going to a legal. So, there’s lot of legal things from your perspective. Have you talked to other people before a similar situation? Did it … Actually gone that far with the legal…
Patrik: I’ll tell you what you can do. I’ll tell you what I can do for you. There is a person I know running a website and the owner is a lawyer, or an attorney, in Atlanta. He is specialized on end of life disputes.
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Bea: Okay.
Patrik: He puts cases on his website every day, right? So, what I would like to do is I would like to send you a link to the blog. You could also contact him if you tell him that I sent you, he knows me, right?
Bea: Here’s the thing, if you can introduce him to me. Is he from Australia?
Patrik: No, no, no, he’s in Atlanta.
Bea: Atlanta. USA?
Patrik: Yeah, yeah, he’s in the US. So, there’s a lot of overlapping interests him and I have.
Bea: I have a question for you.
Patrik: Yeah.
Bea: Now, I talked to the attorney, he seemed to have two parts that confuse me.
First of all, be this second attorney we talked to, we have another attorney, but I didn’t want to use her.
Patrik: Right.
Bea: But the problem is she seemed to be … She’s more of going after the nursing home, a lot of them.
Patrik: Right.
Bea: But she also does hospital. But the problem with that I can see that she is focusing on the first portion of the injury. And that’s where they didn’t give her oxygen and she was actually lost life for a short time.
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Bea: And then the second portion is the ICU experience. I’m not sure, should we separate these two or what?
Patrik: Okay. Yeah, yeah I hear where you’re going with this. So, from my perspective, I don’t think you can separate the two because maybe there was stuff leading up to the ICU admission that there might’ve been medical negligence there and then. But there might have been medical negligence in the ICU too. So, from that perspective, you can’t separate both.
Patrik: But I can also see why a lawyer might want to stay away from the ICU staff because it’s usually outside of their specialty. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to deal with the ICU staff, right? We are dealing with clients all the time who have a lawyer involved and sometimes in more than one situation I get to talk to the lawyer. I realize the lawyer has no idea. The lawyer knows the law but, they have no idea what they’re looking
for.
Bea: Right, right. Very important.
Patrik: Once the evidence is there, that’s when the lawyer comes in. The lawyer has definitely had the time and its place, but the lawyer can only really do its work after they have clinical evidence.
Bea: Right. When I talked to the second attorney, he seemed to be … First time he talked to me and he said he want to file a lawsuit so, it was focused on ICU part.
And then I said, “What about the other part?” He said, “Well that we don’t have to put it in there.” And that was confused me.
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Bea: And I’m telling you we have a time issue here. I did not look very thoroughly.
Because Lawyers are very important to the case.
Patrik: Oh, they are. They are-
Bea: I’m not that happy so far about the attorney that I am actually finding yet.
Patrik: Right, but from my experience, you can’t separate ICU in what happened before. You need to look at both because you need to, for example, your mother went into ICU and you want to find out why she went into ICU and maybe they didn’t pick up on any clinical deterioration before the ICU admission. That’s all in the medical records. We could find-
Bea: She went to ICU, it’s before the code blue. I mean she had a code blue first and then she did … They did an emergency procedure to save her and then she was ICU.
Patrik: Okay, so let me ask you this. There are usually two situations that lead to a code blue. The first situation is the heart stops, or the second situation is a patient stops breathing. Do you know which one? Which of the two happened?
Bea: She stopped breathing. She had a cardiac arrest. Somebody went in-
Patrik: Hang on, stop. Please stop. There’s a difference between stopping breathing and a cardiac arrest. There’s a big difference.
Bea: Okay. Here’s what I know. I think the witness told me after she repeatedly asked for help because she didn’t see any activities in the room when nobody went to help her. And then finally there was an entrance nurse assistant one in the room that several hours later.
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Patrik: Oh, my goodness.
Bea: And she proceeds to throw out a big yell, because she’s found my mother’s already dead.
Patrik: Oh, my goodness.
Bea: So, when that happened, everything was in emergency mode.
Patrik: You need to get the medical records.
Bea: But this is a very severe case. I have not been somebody who’s that … I have the attorney here. I’m a little concerned because I think he may not be detailed enough to do that because this is very … You not only need strength, you need somebody who’s very strong and also detailed on what happened.
Patrik: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s why I … Number one, we need to re-review the medical records in detail. But then you also need a lawyer who really understands this area.
Bea: Oh yeah. That’s the lawyer I find is only doing elder abuse and that’s his area.
Patrik: Okay, so they’re specialized?
Bea: Of course. But even a specialized lawyer does not necessarily fit all of the things.
Patrik: No, no, of course not.
Bea: Same all the dentists. But there’s few good ones. All the others are general.
Patrik: Absolutely.
Bea: You may not even like what they do. That’s true for every other occupation.
Patrik: Absolutely.
Bea: So, I would like to know what’s wrong with a doctor in the ICU who insist to do apnea without our permission? What’s wrong with not keeping her alive with the support while the family member needs to arrive? What’s wrong that she was …
They’re trying to terminate her basically throw her out because they think she’s brain dead.
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Bea: That has been repeatedly … They tell me that she’s brain dead. No need to keep her there.
Patrik: Yeah. At the time in hospital, did you keep a bit of a diary for example?
Bea: I have done, yes.
Patrik: You have?
Bea: Yes.
Patrik: That’s good. You’ve got that?
Bea: I have it written here. Several notes.
Patrik: Good. Good, that’s good. You will need that, you will need that.
Bea: Oh, yeah. The notes are significant. I’m telling you, for example, I can tell you a few things. Okay. Now I have to say, one morning, hospital social worker came to ICU. She said she will get back to me looking but … But looks not serious. When I came back from picking up some food, the dialysis was already ordered by this doctor.
Bea: After 45 my mother’s heart rate comes up, BP goes down, which is blood pressure. Nurse continued heart rate gone up to 155, nurse was very nervous. So, stop dialysis in ICU. He believe that they want to do a dialysis on continually while she’s not even alive
yet.
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Bea: Okay. On 12/30 I talked to Dr. John, that’s a neurologist and says about other EEG and CT brain … And they want to do for CT brain trying to do the test that determined her brain was working and they want to pull the plug. I refused.
Bea: 1/21 in the evening, the CT says already there, but it says she’s not completely out of the danger. Talked to the nurse supervisor ICU brain about the negligence and concerns over Sunday’s event, which is 19th. He understood and said he will address to Mary, who was the manager on ICU.
The 1:1 consulting session will continue in next week’s episode.
Kind Regards
