Justia Lawyer Rating for Robert D. Kreisman

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Wincrest Nursing Center on Chicago’s North Side has been investigated by state and federal authorities for violations committed in its nursing home. The most recent result of this ongoing investigation was a 21-page document theCenters for Medicare & Medicaid Services submitted to the nursing home facility in late February.

Included in the Medicare & Medicaid report were allegations of nursing home abuse, specifically that Wincrest failed to notify state officials of felons living within the facility, which is required under Illinois law. In addition, the report accused Wincrest of being aware that some of its residents had used illegal drugs while housed at its nursing home facility and had been involved in crimes in the area surrounding the nursing home.

Wincrest is an 80-bed home located near Chicago’s Loyola University in Roger’s Park. While Wincrest is mostly home to adults with mental illnesses, some of its residents are known to have felony records. There are seven Loyola resident halls located within a block radius of Wincrest, which house about 600 students.

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The Illinois Appellate Court has found that a medical expert in a medical malpractice case may be impeached with the use of the physician’s §2-622 (Illinois Code of Civil Procedure) report as a prior inconsistent statement. This issue before the court was one of first impression in the state and was decided upon in Iaccino v. Anderson, No. 1-07-0207.
In the Iaccino birth injury lawsuit, the plaintiff’s attorneys alleged that the defendant doctors and hospital were responsible for the brain damage that the minor plaintiff, Jonathan Iaccino, suffered as a result of oxygen deprivation during his birth. The plaintiff’s attorneys alleged that the defendants’ medical negligent occurred as a result of their failure to monitor Jonathan’s fetal heart rate and their lack of response to the hyperstimulation of the uterus during his labor and delivery.

Gary Blake, M.D. provided a Illinois Code of Civil Procedure §2-622 affidavit as one of the plaintiff’s medical experts in Iaccino. When Dr. Blake signed the §2-622 report he stated that the decelerations recorded on a fetal-monitor strip were “variable decelerations.” However, at the trial, Dr. Blake testified that these strips showed “late decelerations” or “variable decelerations with a late component.”

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The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed a trial court decision to treat a defendant doctor’s response to a plaintiff’s request to admit facts as evidentiary evidence rather than a judicial admission. The legal ruling arose out of an Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit involving complications following a surgeon’s attempt to reverse a tubal ligation surgery, Migdalia Serrano v. Carlos A. Rotman, M.D., No. 1-09-2028.
In her surgical malpractice lawsuit, the plaintiff, Migdalia Serrano, alleged that the defendant doctor, Carlos Rotman, M.D., negligently chose not to administer Factor IX, a coagulation factor, before and after her tubal ligation surgery. The plaintiff’s lawsuit alleged that the failure to administer the coagulation factor resulted in an infected hematoma. The Cook County jury trial resulted in a verdict in favor of the defendant surgeon, which the plaintiff then appealed.

At the center of the plaintiff’s appeal was that Dr. Rotman had been aware that Serrano was a hemophilia carrier, which would have made her more susceptible to developing a hematoma. Serrano alleged that Rotman chose not to administer Factor IX despite knowing about her heightened risk for infection. Moreover, the plaintiff alleged that as a result of the surgical malpractice, she suffered from additional medical complications that would not have occurred had she been given the Factor IX prior to her surgery.

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The Illinois Department of Public Health has moved towards the final steps in closing an Illinois nursing home following several deaths of its residents in recent years. According to the governor’s senior health policy adviser, Michael Gelder, the decision was in part preemptive and was simply because “we don’t want another tragedy to occur.”

The State of Illinois advised Alden Village North Nursing Home that it intends to revoke its nursing home license and close the facility located at 7464 N. Sheridan Road in Chicago. As of October 2010, the Illinois nursing home housed around 90 adults and children with severe developmental disabilities. Illinois state officials reported that since January 2008 there have been at least eight serious violations of nursing home abuse and negligence at Alden Village North.

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Most cases brought against Illinois nursing homes are for claims of nursing home abuse or negligence. However, in the case of Carol Kopriwa v. Presbyterian Homes a/k/a Lake Forest Place, 08 L-1033, the plaintiff brought an Illinois personal injury claim against the Illinois nursing home for injuries she sustained while visiting one of its residents.

In January 2007, the plaintiff, Carol Kopriwa, was visiting her seriously ill husband at the Lake Forest Place Nursing Home. This was not the first time Mrs. Kopriwa had visited her husband at the nursing home. However, what was unique about this particular visit was that as Mrs. Kopriwa began to walk away from her husband’s bed she tripped and fell on an electrical cord.

Mrs. Kopriwa had been sitting in a chair next to her husband’s bed right before the fall and had allegedly not noticed the electrical cord being used for his bedside alarm. As a result of her fall, Mrs. Kopriwa sustained a left-sided sacral fracture and left ischiopubic fracture that would require surgery.

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A recent New York Times article reported that a new study indicated that in recent years the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not rigorously studied or tested many of its approved medical devices before clearing them for sale. The study specifically assessed many medical devices which have been the subject of major recalls over the past few years, such as mechanical ventilators, hospital infusion pumps, and external heart defibrillators.

Diana Zuckerman and Paul Brown, both with The National Research Center for Women and Families, headed up the study along with cardiologist Steven Nissen, M.D. of the Cleveland Clinic. The study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on those medical devices that have since been labeled as high risk for recalls between 2005 and 2009. It found that most, if not all, of the medical devices were cleared for public use by the FDA without being first being tested. The FDA and a trade group representing medical device manufacturers called The Archives of Internal Medicine study flawed.

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A Cook County medical malpractice lawsuit received a jury verdict of $1.1 million against the defendant hospital. The case revolved around the medical negligence of a Cook County hospital, which led to need for several additional surgeries for the 60-some year-old plaintiff.

In 2006, the plaintiff was a patient at Northwest Community Hospital, where she had recently undergone a knee replacement surgery. In her second day of recovery following her surgery, the plaintiff fell while using the bedside commode in her hospital room.

Considering that the plaintiff had just had a knee replacement surgery, she was at risk for falls and should have had a plan of care in place that would prevent such falls from occurring. Upon investigation, it seemed that the plaintiff did in fact have such a plan of care in place – her physician had written an order stating that the plaintiff needed her knee immobilizer on and required two people to assist her when using the bedside commode.

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The family of a woman who died during childbirth has settled an Illinois wrongful death case for $14 million. The medical malpractice case resulted not only in the mother’s death, but also involved a child born with brain damage at Chicago’s Advocate Trinity Hospital. The settlement was reached in Sidonia Lawson, etc. v. Advocate Health Hospitals Corp., Cannon Vernon, MD, Jamiere Y. Smith, MD, et al., No. 09 L 12090.

In 2007, the 32 year-old decedent, Sabrina Lawson, went to Advocate Trinity Hospital with labor contractions. While there, the staff induced her with medications to try and speed along her delivery. However, while receiving the labor medications, Lawson’s baby began to show signs of fetal distress.

In such instances, the medical standard of care requires an emergency cesarean section; however, there was a delay of almost seven hours. By the time the baby was born, he had suffered from brain damage as a result of lack of oxygen and blood flow to his brain.

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Prior to the 1980s, the risk of transmitting HIV through transplanted organs was fairly high, at a time when even blood transfusions put patients at risk for contracting the deadly virus. However, in 1985, HIV antibody testing became available, which enabled doctors and medical staff to test to see whether organs were infected with HIV. Therefore in today’s medical climate it is unlikely that an organ transplant recipient would receive organs infected with HIV.

However, in 2007, four Chicago patients were found to have transmitted HIV by way of their transplanted organs. While the transplant surgeries were done at three different Chicago Hospitals, each of the four patients received organs from the same organ donor. At the time of the transplant surgery the donor was not known to be infected with HIV. His organs passed the standard tests for HIV antibodies; however, those tests could not have detected HIV if the donor acquired the infection within a few weeks of his death.

Critics of the way these 2007 transplant surgeries were handled argue that a nucleic acid test could have detected the HIV infection earlier. However, the nucleic acid test was not approved by the FDA until 2009 and even today is not effective 100 percent of the time; too many false positives make the nucleic acid test unreliable as an universal screening tool.

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An Illinois jury entered an Illinois medical malpractice verdict of $5.1 million against an Illinois surgeon and surgical center who failed to diagnose a perforated bowel sustained during pelvic surgery. The plaintiff in Gwendolyn Tate v. Dr. Harrith M. Hasson and The Surgery Center at 900 North Michigan Avenue LLC, 10 L-2437. developed a severe case of sepsis and was left a quadriplegic.

Ms. Tate had been treating with the defendant, Dr. Hasson, for chronic pelvic pain and uterine fibroids, which are non-cancerous growths in the uterus. Dr. Hasson, a practicing obstetrician, endocrinologist, and surgeon, recommended that the plaintiff undergo a surgery to treat her pain and symptoms.

In 2002, Ms. Tate underwent the recommended surgery at Surgery Center at 900 N. Michigan Avenue, LLC.. During the procedure, Dr. Hasson accidently perforated the plaintiff’s bowel. While the perforated bowel might not have been medical malpractice on its own, the failure to recognize that the organ had been perforated was an example of surgical negligence. Patients should be monitored for signs of bleeding and infection following any type of surgery; a failure to do so is below the standard of care.

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