Jan. 2—The state has paid $700,000 to parents who said their daughter suffered "substantial permanent injury" to her right leg after doctors at University of New Mexico Hospital placed a cast incorrectly. While the award fell short of the state's current multimillion dollar cap on hospital medical malpractice awards, the total cost to taxpayers is more than $900,000 because the state spent nearly $203,000 litigating the case, according to the New Mexico General Services Department.
New Mexico in 2021 overhauled its medical malpractice law, raising the cap for hospitals to $4 million in 2022 with increases each year until it reaches $6 million in 2026, The New Mexican has reported. When the lawsuit was filed in 2020, the cap was $750,000. The girl was initially treated at Holy Cross Medical Center in Taos after she dislocated her right hip and fractured her tibia during a skiing accident Feb.
25, 2018, in Red River. The girl, who was learning how to ski, was 7. In Taos, physicians performed a procedure to set the girl's hip and broken tibia without cutting the skin open — a procedure callled a "closed reduction.
" The girl was then transported to UNM Hospital, a public teaching hospital in Albuquerque, to be evaluated for a head injury. Doctors there also recast her leg. "Quite frankly, this girl would have been fine if UNMH would have left her leg alone after Holy Cross worked on her," said Chris Hoffman, an attorney representing the girl's parents.
Hoffman said an orthope.
