Hospital safeguards ‘failed tremendously,’ patient’s widow says

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

The 44-year-old excavator was taken to the emergency room with shortness of breath. Breathing trouble also sent a 64-year-old woman to the same hospital. A third patient, a 79-year-old woman with health problems, was transferred from an assisted-care facility.

Now their relatives allege each died because employees at an Ohio hospital either negligently or intentionally gave them inappropriately large doses of powerful pain medicine.

The families’ wrenching personal stories about loved ones’ deaths are emerging with wrongful-death lawsuits after the Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System announced this week that a doctor ordered pain medicine for at least 27 near-death patients in dosages significantly bigger than necessary to provide comfort.

The announcement involving patients from the past few years raised questions about whether drugs were used to hasten deaths intentionally and possibly illegally. Mount Carmel publicly apologized and said it fired the intensive-care doctor, reported its findings to authorities, removed 20 employees from patient care pending further review and notified affected families.

Christine Allison, of Columbus, said being notified recently that her 44-year-old husband, Troy, was among those cases re-started her grieving process and left her shocked that such a scenario could happen despite procedural and technological safeguards in hospital care.

“The system failed tremendously,” Allison said Thursday.

She said she is sure her husband’s July death wasn’t a case of assisted suicide because he wasn’t communicating with caregivers at the time.

Her lawyer, Gerry Leeseberg, said Troy Allison experienced multi-system organ failure, but Leeseberg said medical records raise questions about whether the man’s condition was as grave as his family was told or might have been treatable.

Allison’s lawsuit is among at least three so far against former Dr. William Husel, Mount Carmel and other employees who approved and administered drugs.

Husel’s lawyers aren’t commenting on the allegations.

Leeseberg said he is representing families of at least a dozen of the 27 patients.