Woman, 21, dies after going to hospital for broken ankle left her brain dead
The family of a young woman who allegedly died after being given too many painkillers have filed a lawsuit against the hospital.
In April, university student Dale Alice Martin fractured her ankle while undertaking farm work and was informed that she would be kept in overnight for surgery.
"It didn’t seem like a very complicated medical issue," the 21-year-old's father, Lindsay Martin, recalled in an interview with NBC.
Fourteen hours later, Martin's family received a phone call to say their daughter had been found unresponsive and was now brain dead. A medical report would later find that Martin had been given an accidental overadministration of narcotics, which caused her to stop breathing and go into cardiac arrest.
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Martin's family have now initiated legal action against Connecticut's Waterbury Hospital, claiming their daughter died due to medical malpractice.
"Within 14 hours of admission, providers at the hospital had administered so much pain medication that Dale stopped breathing and later died," Christopher Mattei of Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, who are representing the Martin family, said.
"No one checked on Dale during this time. The same medications that were interfering with Dale’s breathing were also sedating her," the lawsuit continued. "Dale could not even call for help as she suffocated. At 7 a.m. on April 10, a Waterbury Hospital nurse finally checked on Dale. It was far too late. Her heart had stopped beating."
An investigation into the hospital revealed that it was owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based private company which filed for bankruptcy three months before Dale passed away.
The hospital was later purchased by Hartford HealthCare and is now owned and operated by UConn Health. A spokesperson for the facility told the Hartford Courant: "he quality, safety and wellbeing of our patients is our top priority."
When asked about the reports that funding at Waterbury Hospital was so tight that 'nurses allegedly were buying food for patients' and the facility was struggling to 'function properly', Martin's father said the family had no idea this was the case until after her death.
"Dale did not have a choice of where to go," he said. "She was brought to the nearest hospital."
"We will obviously learn more about the extent to which Prospect's mismanagement of Waterbury Hospital contributed to the specific circumstances on the night that Dale died," Mattei, the family's attorney, said.
"But what we expect to find is that this was a hospital that was largely operating on fumes as a result of Prospect dismantling infrastructure within the hospital, reducing staff, training, and finding every way possible to extract value out of the hospital in a way that jeopardised care."
LADbible has approached Waterbury Hospital and Prospect Medical Holdings for comment.
Brenna Cooper