TTH partners Daniel Grill, along with Jonathan Danko and appellate counsel Gregory Kunkle, recently received a jury’s defense verdict.  They represented an attending physician at a Montgomery County nursing home, who was the attending physician of Plaintiffs’ Decedent.  Decedent was a 72-year-old resident who developed respiratory distress and deteriorated through the afternoon of December 2, 2019.  Plaintiffs alleged Decedent, a patient with a tracheostomy since 2004, developed a mucus plug that occluded her tracheostomy.  Decedent was ultimately taken to the ER where she experienced cardiac arrest en route, later suffering an anoxic brain injury.  Three days later the family made the decision to decline further treatment and to allow Decedent to pass.  Plaintiffs’ case against our client was that he was negligent of supervision of the nursing home staff and also that he was negligent regarding his own treatment and recommendations for Decedent’s tracheostomy care.  TTH successfully defended the case arguing that if there was any negligence surrounding the tracheostomy care, that it was the nursing staff and/or other employes of the facility who were responsible for the formation of the mucus plug and/or failed to timely seek emergency assistance to save Decedent’s life.

After a 4-day trial, the jury returned a verdict finding the facility and the physician negligent; however, the jury found that the doctor’s negligence was not a factual cause of Decedent’s death.  The jury found the facility to be 100% responsible and awarded $700k in wrongful death damages and $300k in survival damages.