Is there any medical malpractice involved?

[gwynethpaltrow8]

My father passed away in December and on the morning of his passing his home health nurse was at the house with us when he started having some chest pain. She checked his blood pressure with our at home blood pressure machine ( which the day prior) she told us it was reliable that only the manual way was. After checking his blood pressure she said it seems to be normal with an elevated heart rate. My dad said the pain went away and she said it must have been from the air freshener that I had used, SHe was told he was a heart transplant patient and was also a diabetic. She just kinda ignored the fact that there might be a bigger issue. Later that evening he went into cardiac arrest and passed away? Can or should the home health agency have done more?

[geol19]

Hard to say. Chest pain is something that is hard to decide how to follow up on. If it's mild and it goes away quickly and vital signs were essentially normal, it wouldn't necessarily demand follow up. But I think that given the fact that he had a transplant (diabetes doesn't make a difference) she maybe should have followed up and called a physician to let them direct her on what to do next. Was your dad mentally all there? If he was concerned he could have called his doctor / called 911 too, on his own.

Would this meet the criteria of malpractice? I doubt it, to be honest. But it wouldn't hurt to have a lawyer look at the case to give their opinion. Sorry for the loss of your father. I know you're wanting to find someone to blame to make this easier on you. But let's face it. . . he had a transplant and his health was not well to begin with. This could have happened at any time, whether the aid was around or not, and he too could have called to get himself help but did not.

[abelard29]

Malpractice centers around standards of care and whether deviation from that standard caused a bad outcome. That is hard to say in this case, as home health personnel are not diagnosticians. Standards for home health care are far different that for say an ER. Your fathers poor health is also a huge contributing factor. Diabetes often masks many symptoms of problems (they just do not feel pain the same way) and being a heart transplant means a lot of meds too as well as complex pathology. Your father should have known when to call 911 as well for his Symptoms--maybe he felt OK after the pain went away. He may even have not wanted to go anyway. The home health care may not have ignored anything, she might have just assessed the situation with the tools she had which are limited. Death is a fact of life that unfortunately can not be fixed every time, nor can blame be assigned. I am sorry he passed on.