Medical Malpractice

Susan Capra, a partner at Clifford Law Offices in Chicago, answers common medical malpractice questions. Susan is also a registered nurse and has combined her medical knowledge with her legal education to help those who have been injured by healthcare professionals. She understands all that it takes to put together a successful medical malpractice case because these matters are highly complex. What is medical malpractice? Susan: Medical malpractice is a cause of action for damages…

USA Today reported on how “Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it” in a weekend story entitled “Deadly Deliveries.” In a cover story of July 27-29, 2018, reporter Alison Young and a team of contributors wrote of how they examined more than half-million pages of internal hospital quality records obtained through federally funded programs and the deliveries of 150 women at hospitals where “deliveries went terribly wrong.” Their findings resulted in…

The birth of a child certainly is one of the most significant events for a family, but all of those hopes are ruined for hundreds of people following two fertility clinics destroying frozen embryos when the liquid nitrogen tanks thawed in March. Imagine women with uterine cancer who counted on those stored embryos to be their only hope for a family. Or those aging women who paid medical professionals assuring them that they would be…

Bradley M. Cosgrove, partner at Clifford Law Offices, obtained a $3 million verdict on behalf of a 52-year-old man who died from a pulmonary embolism 50 days after undergoing leg surgery at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital. The case involved Edward A. Smolinski of Elmhurst who died when doctors failed to prevent, diagnose and treat a pulmonary embolus following surgery to repair a quadriceps tendon in his left leg. The case was brought by his wife Margaret…

An alarming statistic released on January 15th 2017 stated that about two percent of all doctors are involved in half of all medical malpractice settlements, according to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) that has studied this issue for the past 25 years. The NPDB reported that these settlements represented a total of more than $41 billion. At the same time, however, it was reported that only a small percentage of those reporting to this…

Bob Clifford resumed writing a column for the newly redesigned Chicago Lawyer publication that has a subscription base of thousands of lawyers. In Clifford’s latest column he goes into depth about medical errors and how the CDC does not allow physicians, medical examiners, coroners and funeral directors to list medical error as a cause of death. Martin Makary, an American surgeon, has asked the CDC to list medical errors as the third most common cause…

A Cook County Circuit Court jury returned a verdict for $3.3 million against Northwestern Hospital for administering a 56-year-old man 10 times the ordered dosage of an anti-viral drug that led to his kidney failure and death. Keith A. Hebeisen and Sarah F. King, lawyers at Clifford Law Offices, obtained the verdict against the major hospital in a Chicago courtroom following a one-week trial. The six-man-six-woman jury deliberated less than two hours before returning the…

On June 1st, 2016, Keith A. Hebeisen and Bradley M. Cosgrove, partners at Clifford Law Offices, obtained a $7.75 million verdict in Cook County Circuit Court against a doctor whose patient died of cardiac complications hours after spinal surgery. Susan A. Capra, nurse and partner at the firm, worked up the case for the two-week trial before Judge Donald Suriano. The eight-woman four-man jury deliberated for approximately an hour before reaching the $7.75 million verdict…

The latest study on deaths in America indicates that the third leading cause is medical errors. A professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is asking the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to correct its records and list medical errors as the third most common cause of death in the United States with 251,454, following heart disease (614,348) and cancer (591,699). Dr. Martin Makary, a cancer surgeon and professor of health policy…