MIAMI DOCTOR’S MALPRACTICE GETS $33 MILLION JUDGMENT
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Marla Dixon was in the final stage of labor and ready to deliver a baby boy when the obstetrician arrived at her bedside at North Shore Medical Center in Miami.
It was not a high-risk pregnancy. But over the next 90 minutes, the doctor made a series of missteps that led to a tragic outcome for Dixon and her baby — and a $33.8 million malpractice judgment, according to a federal lawsuit.
The doctor ordered nurses to restart a drug to strengthen contractions, failed to perform a Cesarean section — and walked away from Dixon’s room for long periods, once for an eight-minute phone call from his stockbroker, the verdict said.
By the time the baby was delivered on Dec. 2, 2013, he was blue in the face and his limbs were limp, according to the verdict handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert Scola. It took a medical team to revive the infant, named Earl, Jr., and by then he had severe brain damage from lack of oxygen, according to the lawsuit filed by Dixon and the boy’s father, Earl Reese-Thornton, Sr.
The doctor, Dixon said later, blamed her for not pushing hard enough. He also tried to cover his tracks by falsifying the 19-year-old mother’s medical record with a note that made it appear she had refused a C-section, according to the testimony of the nurse in charge of delivery.
For Dixon, the court’s judgment will help pay for a lifetime of round-the-clock care for her son, but it does not go far enough.
“Not one time did he apologize,” Dixon said of the doctor, whose name is Ata Atogho. “He didn’t care. He kept going on with his lies. He blamed me.”
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which represented Atogho in the Dixon case because he worked for the federally funded Jessie Trice Community Health Center at the time, refused to comment.
But as Dixon would later find out, she was not the first parent to sue Atogho for seriously injuring a newborn he delivered in 2013.
Atogho delivered two babies that year who were permanently brain damaged, and a third who was disabled for life, according to lawsuits filed by the injured infants’ mothers — all of whom were teen-aged moms receiving care at Jessie Trice, which serves many of Miami’s low-income and uninsured residents.
But there is no hint of trouble on his Florida medical license.
Deirdre Gilbert, director of the nonprofit National Medical Malpractice Advocacy Association in Texas, said consumers might not be aware that their doctors have a history of medical malpractice because monetary settlements with injured patients are often confidential. In other cases, the doctor isn’t the named defendant in a lawsuit, as in Atogho’s case.
“It’s very hard to find out the truth,” said Gilbert, who became a patient advocate after her daughter died when a doctor with a history of drug abuse and dead patients perforated her esophagus and colon during a gastrointestinal endoscopy.
In each of the three cases involving Atogho, the defendant was the United States, which is liable under federal law for injuries caused by its medical employees.
The physician profile for Atogho maintained by the Florida Department of Health also fails to inform patients of his past, saying only that his license is “clear and active”.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article147506019.html#storylink=cpy
SHAME ON THE FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!!