An appeals court Tuesday shielded a firm that provides hospitalist services from possible punitive damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit about the death of a man at a Jacksonville hospital.
A three-judge panel of the 5th District Court of Appeal overturned a circuit-court ruling and said the estate of William Alvin Deen cannot pursue punitive damages in the lawsuit against Hospital Specialists, P.A. Deen went to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in June 2018 complaining of pain after a colonoscopy.
It was determined that he had a perforated colon, requiring surgery to repair the colon. Later, however, he developed complications, including low blood pressure, and was treated by advanced registered nurse practitioner Robert Lancaster, who provided services for Hospital Specialists, according to Tuesday’s ruling.
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Deen ultimately died, leading to the medical-malpractice lawsuit and a later request to amend the case to seek punitive damages.
“In the proposed amended complaint, appellee (the representative of the estate) alleged that Hospital Specialists, through its president, Dr. Ateeque Khan, committed acts of intentional misconduct or gross negligence by assigning Lancaster, a nurse practitioner, to provide after-hours care to Deen, a patient with complex health problems that were beyond Lancaster’s permissible scope of practice,” Tuesday’s ruling said. “Appellee further alleged that by doing so, Hospital Specialists violated its own written practice protocol, which limited Lancaster’s care of its patients to those with ‘common health problems,’ and that, through Dr. Khan, it had thus condoned, ratified, or consented to the alleged grossly negligent care that Lancaster provided to Deen.”
But the 10-page ruling, written by Judge Brian Lambert and joined by Judges Scott Makar and Paige Kilbane, rejected the punitive-damages arguments.
The ruling, in part, said that “the actions of Dr. Khan, as president of Hospital Specialists, in allowing Lancaster to first take the after-hours call regarding Deen, did not rise to a willful and malicious level whereby Hospital Specialists could be found directly liable for punitive damages.”
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