On November 18, 2011, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an opinion in Springhill Hospitals, Inc. v. Critopoulos, No. 10909646. After undergoing a cardiac-artery-bypass graft, Critopoulos was placed in the cardiac-recovery unit, where a nurse noticed that he had developed a decubitus ulcer. A med-mal lawsuit was brought against several nurses and the hospital. One contention was that the nurses allowed the development of the ulcer because they did not properly move or rotate him while he was bed-ridden. The trial court rejected the defendants’ challenges that the plaintiff’s nursing expert was not “similarly situated.” The jury found for the plaintiff as to all but one nurse and awarded $300,000 in damages. The Supreme Court found that the expert did not qualify as “similarly situated.” The expert was amply qualified in the area of wound-care management and pressure-ulcer prevention; she was a “big wig” at Duke Hospital.
The Supreme Court concentrated on the fact that the care was rendered in a cardiac-recovery unit and involved the concerns and/or risks associated with a fresh post-CABG patient. They also honed in on the point that the expert, “had never seen an immediate post-CABG patient for preventive measures; that she had provided hands-on treatment to fresh postoperative patients only for would care; and that, at Duke, the cardiac-recovery nurses provided pressure-ulcer-prevention care for postoperative patients in the cardiac-recovery unit.” The expert could not evaluate how unique factors in caring for this type of patient would influence decisions as to moving or rotating a patient.
This opinion demonstrates the need to have your expert look as much like the defendant healthcare provider as possible. Critopoulos’s expert was clearly tops in the general field of pressure-ulcer prevention; still, the Supreme Court concluded that post-CABG patients are unique enough that the expert should be familiar with caring for such unique patients. This opinion is consistent with a trend of opinions that hold that a generalist cannot qualify as a “similarly situated” healthcare provider when the defendant was practicing a specialized area of medicine.
