缅北轮奸

The Massachusetts seven-year statute of repose for medical malpractice claims does not shield professionals against separate acts of negligent treatment that allegedly occurred in the years after a disputed medical event more than seven years ago.

The ruling came in a case where a doctor argued that the “definitely established event” in the malpractice claim brought against him in 2017 was his alleged negligent response to an abnormal EKG more than seven years ago in 2006 and thus the claim by the patient’s estate was barred. The trial and appeals courts both agreed with the doctor, whose patient died from cardiac arrythmia in 2016, that the claim was barred.

However, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has overturned those rulings and revived the claim, siding with the estate that alleged that the patient’s death was a result of the doctor’s failure to treat him for his obvious risk of cardiac disease at multiple appointments that were after his EKG came back abnormal in 2006.

For almost 10 years after the EKG, the doctor saw the decedent regularly, for at least 12 appointments. The patient presented with morbid obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and obstructive sleep apnea at those later appointments. Yet the doctor never ordered cardiac testing at any of those appointments.

The court said there are genuine issues of material fact regarding whether the doctor’s treatment within the seven-year period was negligent, without reliance on a negligent response to the abnormal EKG. The court said the negligent acts or omissions related to these appointments could be considered “definitely established events” that fall within the repose period, providing the basis for a medical malpractice claim.

“The 2006 negligence, we emphasize, cannot shield later acts of negligence,” the court concluded.

The estate provided three reports from an expert who said the doctor deviated from common accepted practice and fell below the standard of care expected of the average qualified doctor because he never followed up on the abnormal EKG in 2006 and never ordered another EKG.

The statute provides that “actions of contract or tort for malpractice, error or mistake against physicians . . . shall be commenced only within three years after the cause of action accrues, but in no event shall any such action be commenced more than seven years after occurrence of the act or omission which is the alleged cause of the injury upon which such action is based.”

The court noted that this language constitutes a statute of repose, the effect of which “is to place an absolute time limit on the liability of those within [its] protection and to abolish a plaintiff’s cause of action thereafter, even if the plaintiff’s injury does not occur, or is not discovered, until after the statute’s time limit has expired.” The court added that the repose period begins to run from some “definitely established event.”

The court explained that continuing treatment alone does not toll the statute of repose time period. A 2005 case (Rudenauer v. Zafiropoulos) involved a patient who died in 2000 from cancer that allegedly could have been detected and successfully treated had the doctor properly monitored a kidney condition in 1990 and 1991. However, in that case, although the doctor continued to treat the patient during the repose period, there was no evidence that any act or omission during that period was causally connected to the patient’s eventual death.

The Rudenauer court did not suggest, however, that there would necessarily be only one “definitely established event” for a particular illness or injury. In the case of a doctor treating a patient over many years, there may be more than one “definitely established event,” that is, more than one negligent act or omission from which a repose period might run, the high court stressed.

Topics Massachusetts