Professional Negligence Law Reporter

A Florida appellate court held that claims alleging that a hospital and residential treatment facility had failed to administer a patient’s medications constituted medical, not ordinary, negligence.

Daniela Cortes was transferred from a hospital operated by South Broward Hospital District to a residential treatment facility operated by Henderson Behavioral Health. At the time of the transfer, Cortes was being administered seven medications at the hospital, and the hospital provided the treatment facility with prescriptions for those medications but not the medications themselves. The facility failed to administer Cortes’s medications, and she died four days after the hospital transfer as a result of severe withdrawal syndrome.

Cortes’s estate sued the hospital and facility’s operators, alleging negligence. The plaintiff asserted that the defendants should have known that stopping the medications suddenly would cause Cortes to suffer severe adverse withdrawals symptoms, including life-threatening heart rhythms and seizures. The defense moved to dismiss on the basis that the plaintiff failed to comply with presuit requirements for medical malpractice actions. The trial court denied the motion.

Reversing, the appellate court noted that a claim for medical malpractice arises out the rendering of, or failure to render, medical care or services. Here, the court said, the acts alleged involve the failure to render medical care in that to prove the claims, the plaintiff must show that the defendants had breached the professional standards of care by failing to ensure that Cortes received her medications and recognize her risk of suffering withdrawal symptoms. To prove the plaintiff’s claim, the court added, it must be shown that the defendants had breached the professional standard of care as testified to by a medical expert.

Consequently, the court quashed the trial court’s orders.

Citation: Henderson Behavioral Health, Inc. v. Cortes, 296 So. 3d 923 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2020).