The family of a man killed last week in an Illinois nursing home fire has filed a lawsuit alleging that staff at the Hampton Plaza Health Care Centre were not equipped to handle the fire. Investigators have not yet determined the cause of the fire.
Fires involving elderly or disabled people are horrifying. We are currently handling a product liability case in which an home hospital bed, provided by Johns Hopkins and distributed by Sunrise Medical, caught fire causing a wife/mother to burn to death. It is a tragic case.
I also have handled cases in involving fires that start during surgery. In my cases, the patient caught on fire because the surgeon did not keep the cautery device away from the oxygen that was being given to the patient during the surgery. Doctors and hospitals have long known how to prevent surgical fires, yet they still occur. I would say that any time a patient catches on fire during surgery it is a clearly due to medical malpractice.