Shelley DuBois, sdubois@tennessean.com 4:34 p.m. CDT July 10, 2014
A federal judge has dismissed a request by Saint Thomas Hospital for a summary judgment in a court case focused on the hospital’s role in a deadly meningitis outbreak in 2012.
If approved, the request for summary judgment would have ended the case without a trial.
“I find that plaintiffs have adequately shown their need for additional discovery and its relevance to the issues raised on summary judgment,” U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel wrote in an opinion. Her decision means that the plaintiffs’ lawyers can investigate defendants’ documents and ask the defendants questions under oath.
“The court ... rejected Saint Thomas’ attempt to use legal technicalities to escape accountability,” said Mark Chalos, a lawyer in Lieff Cabraser’s Nashville office who represents several patients in the case.
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If approved, the request for summary judgment would have ended the case without a trial.
“I find that plaintiffs have adequately shown their need for additional discovery and its relevance to the issues raised on summary judgment,” U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel wrote in an opinion. Her decision means that the plaintiffs’ lawyers can investigate defendants’ documents and ask the defendants questions under oath.
“The court ... rejected Saint Thomas’ attempt to use legal technicalities to escape accountability,” said Mark Chalos, a lawyer in Lieff Cabraser’s Nashville office who represents several patients in the case.
continue to read here
1 comment:
Doctors and hospitals should have lobbied for laws to protect them from liability in exchange for agreeing to only use FDA registered outsourcing facilities. The hospital, the clinic it partly-owned, and the doctors working at that clinic, "tool a chance", by using a compounding pharmacy, not an FDA-licensed manufacturer, to buy sterile injectable drugs, all to save a few dollars in their purchasing costs, so they could have a wider profit margin. Those drugs wound up not being sterile, patients were harmed (and some of these patients died), and the hospital will now be held responsible. They lost the gamble, and now will have to pay up.
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