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Link: Irish Medical News.
In the first request of its kind, the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) has been asked by an Irish legal firm to investigate a number of cases of MRSA allegedly acquired in Irish hospitals. The move comes as the HSE reveals its intention to launch a nationwide study into hospital acquired infections. The call from Galway-based solicitors Brian Lynch and Associates, could pave the way for the HSA to investigate whether hospitals acted appropriately to prevent the spread of infection under recent safety at work legislation. A spokesperson for the legal firm, which is representing more than 35 people, said it is his clients’ intention to ascertain whether or not a risk assessment was carried out with respect to hospital acquired infections and if not it is up to the HSA to investigate.
Link: Family Waits A Year For MRSA Death Inquest
A WIDOW'S legal action over her husband's death from MRSA has prevented his inquest going ahead and left her estranged family in "turmoil". David Short, 61, of Zion Road, Blackburn, died after contracting MRSA during a routine operation for ulcerative colitis at Queen's Park Hospital on June 27 last year. An inquest into his death was opened on June 30. But despite calls from his brother, son and sister to have the inquest held then, the legal claim against the East Lancashire NHS Hospital's Trust by Mr Short's widow, Carol Anne, has delayed proceedings. Mrs Short, of Zion Road, said at the time of her husband's death that she had concerns over the standard of care he had received on ward B6. She said she had raised issues of cleanliness and hygiene with staff at the hospital.
Link: Target Five
"If it could happen to me it could happen to anyone," says Laura Waldie, a registered nurse For 14 months, Waldie has battled a staph infection she says she picked up while a patient at Baptist Memorial Hospital in East Memphis. "I get sick whereas I never used to get sick," Waldie says. "Emotionally, I have so many scars now, body self image. It's affected every aspect of my life." Waldie's life now revolves around trips back to the hospital, more than a dozen so far, to clear up complications from MRSA, a bacteria resistant to nearly all antibiotics. "Each time I get sick, each time the bacteria pops back up, I feel like my resolve is getting weaker," Waldie said. In this lawsuit filed by Waldie last October in Shelby County Circuit Court, she claims while originally receiving treatment at Baptist, a student nurse advanced on her with bloody gloves. When Waldie pulled back, she claims the student nurse pulled the central line out of her chest port, then grabbed the line with the non-sterile gloves and replaced it. "I was thinking, oh my God, she just infected me with something." Baptist hospital told us it does have sterilization policies in place which staff are expected to follow, but Baptist's Chief Nursing Officer, Sharon Harris, wouldn't talk specifically about Waldie's case.
Link: South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Claudia Mejia checked into the hospital April 28 and gave birth to a healthy baby boy. But then things went terribly wrong. While in Orlando Regional South Seminole Hospital, she contracted a "flesh-eating" bacteria, and 12 days later doctors amputated her arms and her legs to save her life. Now, Mejia, 24, of Sanford, has begun a legal battle. She is not asking for money. Right now, her lawyers are demanding that Orlando Regional Healthcare System Inc., which operates the Longwood hospital, release information about other victims of the same bacteria. The company has refused, citing patient privacy. "This is a very tragic situation," said Anne Peach, vice president of nursing for ORHS. More than 200 cases of the aggressive streptococcal infection, which is resistant to antibiotics, are reported annually in Florida, according to the state Health Department.
Link: ITV.
A hospital has been forced to pay damages to a South Wales patient who contracted the super-bug MRSA. Lawyers say it's the first reported case of its kind.
Kitty Cope, 87, won ``substantial damages'' after the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend accepted it had not followed its own
guidelines on infection control.
Mrs Cope developed the infection after a hip replacement operation in February 2001. The infection meant her new hip had to be removed.
She took legal action against Bro Morgannwg NHS Trust claiming they had allowed her to contract MRSA by failing to implement their infection control policies and appropriately treat the infection.
The case was settled out of court, and Mrs Cope - who was left permanently disabled - intends to use the ``substantial'' award to install a walk-in bath
and a stairlift at her home in Pencoed.
Link: A Cornish
Frank Thomas, from Hayle, went into the hospital for a triple heart bypass in 2001 but ended up having to have all the front ribs on one side of his chest removed after the infection took hold. The hospital did not admit liability for the infection, but agreed to settle the claim. Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust said: "The Trust always denied that Mr Thomas acquired his infection as a result of any substandard infection control practices and Mr Thomas' solicitors proposed to abandon that part of the claim during the course of the litigation. "Mr Thomas did not produce any persuasive evidence to support the suggestion that infection control practices at Derriford are anything other than high, and patient safety is taken very seriously. Liability was never admitted."
Link: BBC NEWS
A heart patient from Cornwall left with severe injuries after he contracted MRSA has settled his claim against the hospital which treated him. Frank Thomas will receive "substantial" damages after settling his case against Plymouth's Derriford Hospital. His wound became infected after a triple heart by-pass operation in 2001. The hospital did not admit liability and said it denied he acquired his infection as a result of any sub standard practises.
The family of a Lower Bucks County woman who died while an inmate at the county prison has settled a federal lawsuit for nearly $500,000. Bucks County officials this week agreed to pay the family of Virginia Brejcak $160,000, effectively ending a two-year legal battle over what Brejcak's family claimed was "inhumane and inept" medical treatment at the prison. The Bucks County Health Department and a company that dispenses drugs to the prison previously settled with the family for a combined $310,000, bringing the total settlement amount to $470,000. The county's settlement came days before a trial was to begin in federal court. "We certainly feel and believe that the resolution of this case by the defendants is significant and important," said attorney Michael F. Barrett, who teamed with attorney Donna Lee Jones to represent the Brejcak family. Brejcak, a 42-year-old Falls woman who was in prison for a probation violation, died Dec. 26, 2001, of a brain hemorrhage. Her death came two months after she developed severe boils, which methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA caused it was later found.
Link: Times Online.
THE government is bracing itself for a multi-million-euro compensation bill from MRSA victims and their families following last week’s damning report into the state of hygiene in Irish hospitals. The publication is likely to bolster the legal actions being taken by MRSA sufferers. It is currently being analysed by British-based infection control experts, who are advising a number of Irish legal firms. * The independent audit, commissioned last year by the health minister, Mary Harney, after several hospitals refused to reveal their MRSA rates, revealed that 91% of Irish hospitals do not have acceptable standards of hygiene. Galway lawyers are preparing a €3m claim from a woman in her early twenties who contracted MRSA. But this is just the biggest of more than 200 cases believed to be in preparation by medical litigation and personal injury lawyers against the Department of Health, the Health Services Executive, and a number of hospitals named in the audit. The MRSA bug is estimated to have killed more than 240 patients last year. “There was always a risk that litigation would arise from a range of hospital-acquired infections,” said Pat McLoughlin, director of the HSE’s national hospitals offic
Link: Times Online.
A HOSPITAL trust is being prosecuted in what is thought will be the first criminal trial to be brought over the death of a patient. The Crown Prosecution Service has charged Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust under Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The five charges accuse the Trust of failing to ensure the hospital department was run in a way to ensure that patient safety was not put at risk. The prosecution arises from the death of Sean Phillips, 31, a father of one, who went into the hospital to have a knee tendon repaired in 2000. He suffered complications after developing toxic shock syndrome and died three days later after two junior doctors failed to act on his symptoms. The two doctors involved in Mr Phillips’s death have already been convicted of manslaughter. Normally any further legal action against the hospital in such circumstances would be a negligence action for damages in the civil courts.
Link: Patient to sue over superbug - Health - Times Online.
A MAN has decided to sue NHS Grampian after he caught MRSA while being treated at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary for a broken neck. Raymond Taylor, 42, says that he has been left with a hole the size of a fist in his back which may never heal after contracting the superbug. He is in almost constant pain, has undergone several operations and has to sleep sitting upright to ease the agony. The father-of-three fears he will always have an open wound in his back because so much infected tissue had to be taken away to clear up his MRSA. “My life is in tatters. I can’t take my kids anywhere, I can’t work and I can’t even do anything around the house. It just gets me down so much,” he said yesterday. “At the hospital, they eventually told me it was MRSA. But now surgeons say they can’t do anything more to fix the wound. I just want it sorted out. My solicitor believes the hospital knew I had MRSA about a year before they told me.”
Link: News
A heartbroken Kilkenny family of a woman struck down by MRSA will take on the state in a legal battle, which could open the floodgate for thousands of people who have contracted the hospital superbug. The family of 68-year-old Anne Brennan from Paulstown lodged papers in the high court last week. This is the first time anyone in the state has sued over contracting the bug. "There are a lot of questions that have to be answered. The Minister for Health Mary Harney doesn't seem to care about how many people have got MRSA and it has to stop," said her son, Tom. Living nightmare Anne Brennan was admitted to St Luke's Hospital on November 18 with a threatened hernia. Medical staff decided not to operate and she was discharged less than a week later on November 26. Two days later Anne Brennan was in excruciating pain. "Dad rang me at 2 in the morning and told me that mammy had a bad pain in her neck. She was crying with the pain. "She had complained of the pain when she was a patient at St Luke's but the staff there told her it was a crick in her neck from the windows and doors. They didn't seem to have a clue," said Tom.
Link: WKYT 27 NEWSFIRST & WYMT
Nearly a dozen lawsuits claim unsanitary conditions at Jewish Hospital led to serious infections in patients. The 11 lawsuits, filed Monday in Jefferson Circuit Court, claim that patients developed either an infection known as Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus or Vancomycin Resistant Enterococcus. One of the patients had both, according to one suit. The infections are not necessarily dangerous to healthy people, but can afflict patients with depressed immune systems, including the very young, the very old and those who are already very ill or have had surgery. Ten former patients and the estate of an 11th filed the lawsuits.
Link: Times Online.
An 87-year-old widow from south Wales has become the first person to be awarded compensation for contracting MRSA in hospital. Kitty Cope received an out-of-court settlement believed to be about £11,000 yesterday after contracting the antibiotic-resistant infection during a hip replacement four years ago. Bro Morgannwg NHS Trust, which runs the Princess of Wales hospital at Bridgend, accepted that it was liable because it had not followed its guidelines on infection control.The infection was discovered on the day that Mrs Cope was due to be discharged. She had to have her new hip removed as a result and is too frail to have a second replacement. It has left her permanently disabled and she can walk only with the aid of a Zimmer frame.
Link: Scotsman.com
A LANDMARK legal case which has seen a Welsh hospital pay out "substantial damages" to a patient who contracted MRSA may open the floodgates on compensation claims in Scotland. In the first reported case of its kind, the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, has been forced to pay damages to a patient who contracted the superbug. Kitty Cope, 87, won "substantial damages" after the hospital accepted it had not followed its infection control guidelines.
Link: Examiner.
UP to 50 people affected by the killer bug, MRSA, are to sue the State on grounds they or their families were infected due to lax hygiene controls in hospitals. If successful, the landmark case could spark a raft of claims and expose the Government to a potentially massive legal bill. A well-known firm of Dublin solicitors, with wide experience in the area of medical litigation, informed the newly-formed MRSA And Families action group yesterday that they will take either individual cases or a group action.
Link: Scotsman.com
A SUPERBUG victim is taking legal action against a Scottish hospital believed to have the nation's worst MRSA infection rate. Grandfather Robert Herbertson is suing for £100,000 after falling ill with MRSA at Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen, where an astonishing one in every 62 patients is struck down by the potentially deadly bacteria. The 63-year-old claims poor conditions at the hospital are the reason why it has an MRSA infection rate almost four times the Scottish average. The hospital, run by NHS Grampian, recorded 91 cases out of just 5,645 patients last year. Research by Scotland on Sunday highlights Woodend, which cares predominantly for the elderly, as having the worst superbug record of any individual unit in the country.
Link: icLiverpool
GOVERNMENT plans to hold hospitals criminally liable for patients who catch superbugs could cost the Merseyside and Cheshire health service at least £10m a year, a leading Liverpool lawyer has warned. Paul McCarthy, president of the city's Law Society branch, spoke after Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pledged a "much stronger" legal framework that would hold hospitals accountable for MRSA cases. Mr McCarthy welcomed Government proposals for a new Hygiene Bill, which he said would make it easier for patients to pursue civil compensation claims. He estimated it could cost hospitals in Merseyside and Cheshire about �10m a year, based on an average compensation award of �50,000.
Link: SocietyGuardian.co.uk
A woman who spent four months in a coma after contracting the superbug MRSA in hospital is suing the NHS trust she claims is responsible. Tanya Page was given a less than 10% chance of survival after her body was "invaded" by the bug when she was taken to Princes Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, Sussex with pneumonia. The 31-year-old former childminder, a mother of two, has been left with arthritis and osteoporosis and has been unable to work since contracting the deadly bug five years ago. Since then the hospital, part of the Brighton and Sussex University hospitals NHS trust, has been praised by the National Audit Office for its work in tackling MRSA. Ms Page has 70 scars on her body as a result dozens of operations and claims her marriage broke up as a direct result of battle with MRSA. She is attempting to sue the trust for �260,000.
Link: MRSA superbug infection forum
This question below sparked several answers that may be helpful to those asking about legal action. Click the link above
Does anyone have any examples of the sums paid in compensation to sufferers of MRSA. I have a family member whose serious infection led to septicaemia and renal failure. He is 50 and will not work again. We'd like some guidance on how to pitch his claim.
Link: Serious About News.
A VICTIM of the MRSA superbug is suing Milton Keynes hospital for more than £150,000 for alleged clinical negligence. Specialists claim John Anderson, 50, will never walk again, be permanently on crutches and probably never work again and will be permanently on crutches. After extensive surgery, his left left leg is now three-and-a-half inches shorter than his right. Mr Anderson has filed a High Court writ against MK General Hospital NHS Trust and Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust. The writ claims: 'The damages claimed exceed £150,000 for personal injuries suffered as a result of clinical negligence on or about November 11, 2000'.
Link: Nursing Times News
Health campaigners have called for patients who contract MRSA infections in NHS hospitals to be compensated financially. Peter Walsh, chief executive of the charity Action against Medical Accidents also said at the Clean Hospitals Summit in London that hospital-acquired infections killed at least 5,000 people and cost the health service more than £1 billion a year. He criticised the complacency with which NHS managers had treated MRSA in the past and welcomed the priority now being given to the problem. 'Sometimes hospital managers add insult to injury by the way they respond to complaints from patients or families affected by MRSA. Commonly, they will just say that the bug is endemic and nothing more can be done, or they suggest that the patient may have brought the infection into the hospital themselves,' he said.
Link: Mrsa: 10 Mar 2005: Written answers (TheyWorkForYou.com).
Paul Burstow (Sutton & Cheam, LDem) Hansard source
To ask the Secretary of State for Health pursuant to the answer of 9 February 2005, Official Report, column 1623W, on MRSA" >MRSA, what assessment has been made by the National Health Service Litigation Authority of the risk to the NHS of civil litigation cases from patients who have contracted MRSA in hospital through a hospital's negligence.Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central, Lab) Hansard source
holding answer 4 March 2005
The NHS Litigation Authority assesses future claims provisions on an aggregate basis for the whole of the national health service. Risks associated with specific conditions are not assessed or identified separately.
Link: Sheffield Today
A FAMILY who claim a young mum died after contracting the MRSA superbug at a Sheffield hospital is planning legal action. Lisa Clinton, aged 34, did not die from MRSA but the family claim it led to her catching a fungal infection which killed her. They say the mum-of-two, of Tunwell Drive, Ecclesfield, suffered a string of illnesses at Sheffield Hallamshire Hospital after doctors failed to put her in an isolation unit. Lisa had been admitted to hospital with a liver infection and breast cancer. Now husband Wayne, aged 39, is set to sue Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust over negligence claims.