Articles related to LEGAL MATTERS

“There have been a handful of cases which have now held, for one reason or another, that a third party can pursue a claim against a health care practitioner if they were injured as a result of that health care practitioner’s negligence to his or her own patient. What does this mean practically speaking? It opens the door for more lawsuits, lawsuits from people who were never your patient, but who may be impacted by a prescribing decision you make for your patient.”

Nurses and the American Nurses Association (ANA) worry the conviction of RaDonda Vaught could set precedent as the profession struggles with burnout and exhaustion due to COVID-19. In 2019, Vaught, 38, was charged with reckless homicide and impaired adult abuse after she allegedly gave a patient a paralytic instead of a sedative ahead of a PET scan.

A class action lawsuit against TeamHealth has concluded with a $15 million award settlement to be shared by some 3,000 emergency physicians in almost every US state. The doctors named in the court case alleged that TeamHealth, one of the nation’s largest medical staffing companies with 15,000 physicians, and its subsidiary Paragon Contracting Services, LLC, were in breach of their contracts and secretly cheated doctors out of a portion of the bonuses they were promised. The physicians claimed that their contracts required TeamHealth to pay them a bonus when they supervised care provided by a physician assistant, nurse practitioner, or other advanced practice provider (APP), but that did not happen.

Congress is looking into allegations that several nurse staffing agencies have been engaging in price gouging during the pandemic by charging hospitals extremely high fees for the services their nurses provide. The allegations have stirred the nursing community, which is growing concerned about possible implications, particularly whether the political scrutiny will result in state-level restrictions placed on the amounts that staffing agencies can charge for nursing services.

The plaintiff, an emergency medicine physician, filed the lawsuit for wrongful termination against EmCare’s Kansas and Missouri subsidiaries, alleging that he was terminated because he complained about dangerous and illegal understaffing at the Overland Park emergency department. On March 2, 2021, the Missouri Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case, finalizing the judgment in the plaintiff’s favor.

That’s the question in this highly unusual case, in which the plaintiff made an emergency motion for a mistrial, arguing that the jury witnessing the defendant coming to the aid of one of their fellow jurors may have prejudiced the jury. Read this fascinating story from MPR and ask yourself whether the situation had influenced the verdict in any way or resulted in a denial of a fair trial.