Reference no: EM133334613
Case Study: John Doe is brought to the IGH emergency room by ambulance, unconscious and bleeding heavily. He goes into cardiac arrest, and hospital staff revive him and perform surgery to stop the bleeding. When John regains consciousness, he yells at the nurses and physicians for reviving him and operating because he had a Do-not-resuscitate order (DNR) that was in his patient record with that hospital; however, the providers did not access the record before reviving him even though they knew he had a record at that hospital. Shortly after this episode, John loses consciousness and within days loses most of his brain function and enters into a persistent vegetative state.
When John's family becomes aware of his condition, his adult son brings an email from John--written a few months before--to John's physicians, in which John wrote that if he ever became incapacitated he'd want his son to make decisions for him. Other members of the family are angry because they claim that John would never have allowed his son to make health decisions for him. The email was from John's email account, but there's no other indication of whether John actually wrote it or whether he was competent at the time he wrote it. John insists that all care be maintained in the hope (likely futile) that John will eventually recover. The rest of the family disagrees, and the physicians believe that there is no reasonable expectation that John will ever awaken, let alone recover. Both the physicians and the remainder of the family want to remove life sustaining care, which would cause John's death within days if not hours. Despite the son's protests and claims of decision-making authority, the physicians remove care and John dies the next day.
Following John's death, his son decides to file multiple legal claims in the state trial court against the hospital and relevant providers:
(1) battery for providing care when John arrived in the ambulance unconscious;
(2) battery for reviving John despite his DNR; and
(3) "wrongful death" negligence for withdrawing care and violating John's email granting authority to his son.
Question: Can the hospital and providers defend against each of these claims, and how?