Who is libby zion

In doing so, the doctors were responsible for a critical oversight. Within 24 hours of being admitted to New York Hospital, Libby went into cardiac arrest. Soon after, she died. Jessie Stephens. Executive Editor. Listen Now. In a report published by the Australian Medical Association AMA in , it was found that doctors were falling asleep on the job and unable to go to the bathroom during shifts that could last for as long as 76 hours. We learned in — and countless times since — exactly what happens when those in charge of our care are overworked and underslept.

Although Dr. Stone consulted with Dr. Sherman, an attending, Dr. Sherman remained at home that night. On January 21, , Stein held the first of three public forums that focused on medical malpractice and patient safety and cited a Ralph Nader Health Research Group study that estimated that there were , Americans injured or killed each year because of medical negligence.

The grand jury report also severely criticized aspects of medical education, particularly the long duty hours, sleep deprivation, and lack of adequate supervision of interns and residents.

David Axelrod convened a blue ribbon panel to investigate charges of negligence. Bertrand Bell, a primary care physician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx—recommended a series of changes in graduate medical education.

The changes were to be implemented in all hospitals throughout New York State by July 1, With interns and residents working fewer hours per shift—and the need to have a certain number of doctors on duty to care for patients loads—hospitals would have to hire more experienced, and more costly, doctors to make up the difference.

And if you know anything about these kinds of systems, you know how doggedly they resist change. Alongside his reform efforts, Sidney Zion sought justice in court. In , Zion initiated a negligence case against Dr. Sherman, the intern Dr. Luise Weinstein, two residents, and New York Hospital. It took ten years for the case to reach trial. Moore, and his wife, Judith A. Livingston, also a senior partner at the same firm.

The defendants were represented by three attorneys: Frank Bensel, assisted by Peter Crean, represented the hospital, the intern, the emergency room resident, and the private attending, Dr. The other resident, Dr. Gregg Stone, was represented by Luke Pittoni. Stone claimed that Sherman, in a telephone call, had approved giving Libby Demerol.

Sherman denied this. Tired of the bad publicity, New York Hospital wanted to settle the case. Sidney Zion also seemed willing to settle but demanded that the hospital publicly take full responsibility for the death of his daughter.

Other television networks broadcasted clips from the proceedings on a regular basis, and all of the major New York newspapers had reporters covering the trial—I attended much of the trial, researching a potential profile of Tom Moore for Esquire Magazine. The more egregious mistake, according to Moore, was that the doctors never really looked for a bacterial infection as the underlying illness.

Despite increases in her white blood count revealed by a blood test soon after Libby arrived at the hospital should have clearly indicated the presence of such an infection. Had the doctors diagnosed her properly in the ER, they would have treated her differently.

The first fatal error was prescribing Demerol to a patient who was taking Nardil. These actions, Moore would argue over and over again, clearly departed from good and accepted medical care, constituting negligence. But Moore and Sidney Zion wanted something else as well: punitive damages against New York Hospital for the system that required interns and residents to work long hours with inadequate supervision.

In order to prove punitive damages, the plaintiff must prove gross negligence. Moore argued that these sleep-deprived, relatively inexperienced doctors practicing with inadequate supervision were evidence of gross negligence.

It was, not surprisingly, a long-shot. First, what happened to Libby Zion was tragic but unforeseeable. Every one of the doctors who saw and treated her acted responsibly and within the bounds of good and accepted standards of care. The diagnosis was reasonable, as was the treatment. Hindsight, the defense argued, is not a basis for declaring malpractice.

The second prong of the defense strategy, however, was more offensive: blame the victim. It was revealed that Libby had used cocaine sometime before going to the emergency room. In addition to Demerol, cocaine also has a potentially deadly interaction with Nardil. And when asked by the doctors and nurses—several times—whether she had used any illicit drugs, Libby denied it.

Had Libby simply admitted the truth, the defense posited, their treatment of her symptoms would have been far different. The trial lasted almost three months. Expert witnesses testified about what the various tests, examinations and symptoms really meant, how they should have been interpreted, and how Libby should have been—or was—treated. Some of the defense witnesses argued that the dose of Demerol given to Libby was too small to have killed her. Others, including several of the defendants, admitted that the Demoral should not have been administered.

Both sides called in experts sleep deprivation. The defense witness, unsurprisingly, argued the opposite. Occasionally, counsel elicited truly shocking admissions from the witnesses. Sherman, one of the defendants. Moore asked: if Libby had been transferred to the ICU as late as in the morning, would she have survived? Negligence has been declared. A Manhattan grand jury refused to indict the hospital, intern or resident, although it noted that the wrong medication and the physical restraints contributed to her death.

But in a report last year it did make some harsh judgments about the system that left such a severely ill patient in the hands of exhausted, inexperienced house staff. Most important, the grand jury noted that both the intern and the resident had already been working for 18 hours when Libby was admitted to their care.

And it urged that the New York Department of Health set limits on how many consecutive hours the house staff in teaching hospitals could be required to work. Legislation has been proposed in many states to limit the working hours of interns and residents. Most call for no more than 80 hours per week, averaged out over four weeks; some, like a California plan, specify no more than 12 hours straight in an emergency room or 16 hours elsewhere, with certain exceptions.

It seems like such obvious good sense. After all, there are limits on how long pilots, truck drivers and other workers are supposed to stay on the job. Surely the work of physicians is at least as important. This error was a complication of the information explosion that was occurring in medicine and the lack of a simple technology that we now have to prevent such disasters. In the subsequent court case, which was aired on Court TV, six medical departments heads Chiefs of Medicine at major hospitals testified in the case.

Several of these experts admitted under oath that they themselves had not heard of this drug interaction before the Zion case. These men were among the most brilliant and esteemed physicians in the country. And they had the integrity to say that they themselves could have made the same error, because no doctor can carry every piece of minutia in his brain.

Sidney Zion, the father of Libby Zion, was a wealthy and powerful attorney. He was also a former writer for the New York Times. He insisted that his daughter had died due to overwork and a lack of supervision of these young doctors.

He was seething with anger. And he did more than accuse them of medical malpractice. He went beyond the pale. Specifically, he faulted the long-hours that all medical residents worked during training.

This system had been the bedrock of physician education for decades. The untenable argument made by Mr. Zion was that if only an attending physician had been in the hospital, if only these young doctors had been better supervised or more rested, his daughter would still be alive.

In May of , the DA agreed to allow a grand jury to consider murder charges against the young doctors who cared for Libby Zion. The grand jury declined to indict the doctors for murder, but in , they charged these doctors with 38 counts of gross negligence. The impact on the medical staff at Cornell was devastating. Physicians across the country watched in horror.

The Zion case was subsequently investigated by the state board of medical examiners in New York.