Medical Center facing malpractice lawsuit for woman’s death
Janice Kooser, a 63-year-old woman recovering from an operation on her thigh, died Sept. 5, 2003, at Fort Walton Beach Medical Center. Her son, Chip Kooser, was stunned to learn through a medical examiner’s report issued several days later that the cause of his mother’s death was listed as “blunt force trauma” to her head. No one at the hospital told him that his mother, whose condition made her a high-risk candidate for falling, fell on Sept. 2. Kooser is suing the hospital, alleging medical malpractice. She went into a coma two days after the stumble and died the next day. Kooser fell when she tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, according to testimony. The hospital’s attorneys maintain the nurse on duty the night of the fall actually prevented the woman’s head from striking anything other than the mattress of her bed. The undisputed facts of the case are that Kooser had been hospitalized since mid-August 2003 and that she was physically unsteady and at times delusional or mostly incoherent. She was listed on charts that rate a patient’s risk of falling as a 31, one point higher than the chart’s maximum. Medical testimony also established that Janice Kooser had what is known as a subdural hematoma, a condition that would have made her more vulnerable to head injury than she already was.
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