On Friday, October 19, 2012, the Alabama
Supreme Court issued Hill v. Fairfield Nursing & Rehabilitation Center,
LLC. Hill suffered a broken leg while being helped out of bed by a
nursing assistant at the Fairfield Nursing Home. Hill was 85 at the time
of the fall and had been a Fairfield patient since 1992.
In addition to suing Fairfield, Hill
sued a number of other entities seeking to “pierce the corporate veil.”
Prior to trial, the trial court granted summary judgments to these other
entities. At the close of Hill’s case-in-chief, the trial court granted
Fairfield’s JML motion. The Supreme Court reversed both the JML and the
summary judgment.
Hill’s designated standard-of-care expert
was Nelson, “a registered nurse since 1997, who had worked in skilled-nursing
facilities and who had supervised both certified nursing assistants and
licensed practical nurses.” Fairfield contended that its physical-therapy
department assessed or determined the measures to take when getting Hill out of
bed and that because Nelson was not licensed, trained, or experienced in the
field of physical therapy, she was not a similarly situated health-care
provider. The Supreme Court declared that Fairfield could not rely on its
delegating “to its physical-therapy department responsibility for making
patient-transfer assessments” because, “[u]ltimately, [Fairfield’s] position
would allow any institutional medical provider to control the standard of care
for which it will be held responsible simply by having some department within
its corporate structure, rather than the law, select the standard of
care applicable to various activities undertaken by its individual
medical-provider employees.” (Emphasis in original.)
Thus, Nelson could testify as to the standard of care applicable to the
“certified nursing assistant in effecting a transfer of a patient such as Hill
and as to whether [the assistant] met that standard in this case.”
Hill’s designated causation expert was
Dr. Volgas, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon who treated Hill following the
fall. Fairfield contended that the broken leg could have been caused by
her osteoporosis. In responding to a question, Dr. Volgas acknowledged
that “this fracture [could] have occurred prior to … falling at the nursing
home” but proceeded to declare that this was not likely “because of the
fracture pattern and because of where the fracture is.” The Supreme Court
held that Dr. Volgas’s testimony was sufficient to create a jury question as to
whether the fall was the probable cause of this broken leg.
The opinion extensively discusses
Alabama law regarding piercing the corporate veil and details the extensive
evidence proffered by Hill. Among other things, Fairfield owned no real
property or significant personal property and carried only $25,000 in liability
insurance. The Supreme Court held that genuine questions were
created as to whether Fairfield was the “alter ego” of the other
entities.
