Gulf View Medical is challenging the decision of a High Court Judge to award former finance minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira $18 million in compensation for negligence in the death of her husband, who died at the hospital following a prostate operation in 2004.
Making submissions in the Court of Appeal yesterday, the hospital’s lawyer, British Queen’s Counsel Mary O’Rourke, said Justice Vasheist Kokaram made an error when he found the institution was negligent in Russell Tesheira’s death based on its decision to accept that it had a duty of care to him as a patient.
O’Rourke said the case pleaded before the judge did not include vicarious liability or the liability of the nurses and hospital administration staff, neither of whom, she said, could give instructions as it related to the procedure. O’Rourke will continue her submissions before Appellate Judges Allan Mendonca, Prakash Moosai and Judith Jones when the case resumes tomorrow.
Insurance executive Tesheira died at age 54 after undergoing an operation for transurethral resectioning of the prostate at Gulf View Medical on April 13, 2004. Two hours after the procedure, Tesheira was found to be bleeding excessively, prompting doctors to perform a secondary operation and emergency blood transfusion. He died on the operating table.
Six years later his widow filed the lawsuit, claiming her husband died because the hospital and two doctors who did the procedure—anaesthesiologist Dr Crisen Jendra Roopchand and urologist Dr Lester Goetz—were negligent.
As he ruled in Nunez-Tesheira’s favour, Kokaram staid Gulf View Medical and Roopchand had both failed to discharge their duties to the requisite standard of care expected of specialists and hospital authorities, in managing the risk of post-operative bleeding arising out of the procedure.