May 01, 2016
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A jury awarded a Delaware County woman almost $6 million after she mistakenly got her appendix taken out at Taylor Hospital
A jury has awarded just under $6 million in damages to a Delaware County woman who underwent an unnecessary surgery at Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park after a radiologist looked at the wrong patient's X-ray, reports the Delaware County Daily Times.
Darlene Hill, of Swarthmore, went to the ER in December 2009 after feeling pain in her abdomen. After she took a type of X-ray known as a CT scan, her files were somehow mixed up with that of another patient who appeared to have a perforated appendix. She was immediately taken to surgery and had her appendix removed, even though the surgeon didn't see anything wrong.
Hill's attorney, Francis Curran, told the paper that the mix-up "was not really fully explainable."
Curran said that she has suffered from painful nerve damage because of the unnecessary surgery. She discovered the mistake five months after the surgery.
A jury determined that South East Radiology, which provided the radiologist under contract with the hospital, bore some blame, but that the majority of the fault lay with the hospital. It awarded the woman almost $6 million for past and future medical costs, lost earnings and non-economic losses.
“We thank the members of the jury for their thoughtful deliberation,” Grant Gegwich, a spokesperson for the Crozer-Keystone Health System which runs the hospital, told the paper in a statement. “In this case, we acknowledged the error previously and disclosed it to the plaintiff as soon as we recognized it and then worked to achieve a fair settlement with her.”
Read the full story here.
