Vinchiarello v. Kathuria

558 A.2d 262, 18 Conn. App. 377, 1989 Conn. App. LEXIS 145
CourtConnecticut Appellate Court
DecidedMay 16, 1989
Docket6708
StatusPublished
Cited by22 cases

This text of 558 A.2d 262 (Vinchiarello v. Kathuria) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Connecticut Appellate Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Vinchiarello v. Kathuria, 558 A.2d 262, 18 Conn. App. 377, 1989 Conn. App. LEXIS 145 (Colo. Ct. App. 1989).

Opinion

Foti, J.

In this medical malpractice action, the plaintiff administratrix appeals from the judgment rendered, after a jury trial, in favor of the defendants, Nirmal Kathuria, a psychiatrist, and the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital. The plaintiff claims three errors in the trial court’s instructions to the jury. We find no error.

The jury could reasonably have found the following facts. On July 13,1983, Delores Thorpe died as a result of a self-inflicted overdose of the drug Asendin which was prescribed by the defendant Kathuria. The defendant Kathuria is employed by the hospital, and treated Thorpe for approximately five years prior to her suicide. Thorpe had a history of mental and emotional problems and, in the six years prior to her death, had attempted suicide five times. Kathuria began prescribing Asendin to Thorpe on June 3,1982, in fifty milligram tablets of one hundred units and, on June 23,1983, increased the dosage to one hundred tablets of one hundred milligrams. Thorpe spent [379]*379some time as an inpatient at the hospital between 1978 and 1981. Following her discharge on May 8, 1981, Kathuria continued to treat Thorpe, as an outpatient, at the hospital psychiatric clinic.

The plaintiff claims that the trial court made three errors in its charge to the jury: (1) in charging the jury not to consider the theory of negligence set forth in sub-paragraph 11 (b) of the complaint; (2) in its instruction on the issue of timeliness with respect to subparagraph 11 (c) of the plaintiffs complaint; and (3) in instructing the jury not to consider the defendants’ failure to keep adequate medical records. We find no error in the court’s charge.

The following procedural facts are relevant to the first issue. The plaintiff’s complaint set forth five theories of negligence.1 Subparagraph 11 (b) of the complaint alleged [380]*380that the defendants were negligent in that they prescribed and dispensed the drug Asendin to Thorpe in large dosages “as an outpatient without proper supervision, control and restriction on the dosage and amount of said drug to the plaintiffs decedent in light of the decedent’s recurring severe depressive state and past history of suicide attempts.” Paragraph 11 (e) of the plaintiff’s complaint, which was abandoned by the plaintiff during the trial, alleged that the defendants were negligent in that “[t]hey prescribed and/or dispensed said drug to the plaintiff’s decedent in the described dosages and amounts without control and supervision when due care, under the described circumstances, required such dosages and amounts only be administered in a hospital with professional supervision and control.”

The trial court concluded that subparagraphs 11 (e) and 11 (b) of the complaint alleged the same theory of negligence and interpreted subsection 11 (b) of the complaint to aver that “Asendin should only have been prescribed and administered in a hospital environment and not provided on an outpatient basis.” Because the plaintiff presented no evidence on the issue of whether Asen-din should be prescribed only on an inpatient basis, the trial court instructed the jury to ignore those allegations of negligence. The plaintiff excepted to the charge claiming that the court had misinterpreted subpara-graph 11 (b) of her complaint. The plaintiff argued that, although the emphasis in subparagraph 11 (e), which was abandoned, was that the defendants were negli[381]*381gent in prescribing and dispensing Asendin to an outpatient, subparagraph 11 (b) alleged negligence in the defendants’ failure to monitor properly Thorpe’s ingestion of the drug.

The plaintiff concedes that there was no evidence presented at trial to establish that Asendin should only be prescribed to inpatients. The plaintiff claims that the trial court erred in interpreting subparagraph 11 (b) of the complaint to be limited to the issue of whether the drug should have been prescribed only for inpatient treatment and thereby directing a verdict for the defendant on that theory of negligence, as well as on the theory that the defendants were negligent in failing to monitor properly Thorpe’s care. We do not have to decide whether the trial court erred in its interpretation of subparagraph 11 (b) because we conclude that its decision to direct a verdict on the “monitoring” theory of negligence was nevertheless appropriate. The plaintiff did not present any evidence that the defendants’ failure to monitor and supervise Thorpe was the proximate cause of her death. Thus, under either interpretation of subparagraph 11 (b), a directed verdict was appropriate. We will not reverse the trial court where we find it reached the correct result. Rostenberg-Doern Co. v. Weiner, 17 Conn. App. 294, 301, 552 A.2d 827 (1989).

In a medical malpractice action, “the plaintiff must present medical expert testimony to establish that the defendants’ treatment and care fell short of the required standard [of care] and that the breach proximately caused the plaintiff’s injury. . . . ‘In Connecticut, both [the] breach of the standard of care and proximate cause must be proved by expert testimony.’ Campbell v. Pommier, 5 Conn. App. 29, 32, 496 A.2d 975 (1975). Tt is well settled that the plaintiff cannot prevail unless there was positive evidence of an expert nature from which the jury could reasonably conclude [382]*382that the defendant was negligent, except where there is manifest such gross want of care or skill as to afford, of itself, an almost conclusive inference of negligence that the testimony of an expert is not necessary.’ Puro v. Henry, 188 Conn. 301, 305, 449 A.2d 176 (1982); Console v. Nickou, 156 Conn. 268, 273-74, 240 A.2d 895 (1968).” (Citation omitted.) Perez v. Mount Sinai Hospital, 7 Conn. App. 514, 520, 509 A.2d 552 (1986).

The plaintiff’s expert testified that Kathuria did not follow an established treatment plan for the decedent’s care between June 24, 1982, and June 24, 1983, and that the number of times Kathuria treated Thorpe during this time fell below the community standard of care. The plaintiff’s expert did not testify, however, that in his opinion there was a causal relationship between Thorpe’s suicide and Kathuria’s failure to monitor her care more frequently. Because the plaintiff did not offer expert testimony to establish that, while the decedent was an outpatient, untimely, improper or inadequate monitoring of the decedent’s care was a substantial factor in causing her death, the trial court acted properly in directing a verdict for the defendants on that issue.

The plaintiff’s next claim is that the trial court erred in instructing the jury that it did not recall any evidence of “untimely” treatment as claimed in subparagraph (c) of the complaint.2 We disagree. Although the court commented that it could not recall evidence that a fail[383]*383ure to provide timely care was a proximate cause of the decedent’s death, it left the ultimate duty of fact-finding to the jury.

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Bluebook (online)
558 A.2d 262, 18 Conn. App. 377, 1989 Conn. App. LEXIS 145, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/vinchiarello-v-kathuria-connappct-1989.