By Alex Stein
The Colorado Supreme Court recently delivered an important decision on medical malpractice, P.W. v. Children’s Hospital Colorado, — P.3d —- (Colo. 2016), 2016 WL 297287. This decision denied a hospital the comparative negligence and assumption of risk defenses that purported to shift to the patient the duty to eliminate or reduce the risk that the hospital was obligated to guard against.
The defendant hospital admitted a known suicidal patient to its secure mental health unit and placed him under high suicide-risk precautions. The hospital’s staff failed to follow those precautions by allowing the patient to be alone in a bathroom for twenty minutes. During these twenty minutes, the patient hanged himself with his scrub pants and suffered a devastating anoxic brain injury. Read More