$36.5 Million Malpractice Award May be Record for Conn.(OBGYN)

[Sgent]

Insurance Journal

A jury has awarded $36.5 million to the family of a 6-year-old boy who is blind, brain damaged and suffering from cerebral palsy since he was injured during his delivery via a surrogate mother at Hartford Hospital.

The hospital was found 60 percent liable; the attending physician, Dr. Peter J. Doelger, an obstetrician/gynecologist with offices in Avon, Bloomfield and Hartford, 40 percent.

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The jurors found Doelger failed to interpret strips from a monitoring device that indicated the fetus was in distress, court records show. The difficult delivery continued so long, the fetus suffered from a dangerous increase in blood acidity; the child should have been delivered by Caesarean section long before it was, the jurors concluded.

The hospital was deemed liable, the jury said, because its nurses failed to alert Doelger to the distress signals, the records show.

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and you wonder why we do so many C-Sections.

I feel sorry for the family. In reality, it was probably either the hospitals or the doctor's fault -- I find it hard to believe that it was truly 50/50.

[Atman]

1. This is actually old news

I'm in CT. This happened quite a while ago. It won't stand.