A lawsuit over a Northern Light Health surgeon who removed a woman’s bladder instead of her ovarian cyst is going to trial next week.
Emily Mitchell of Skowhegan filed the lawsuit in Kennebec County Superior Court against the dominant health provider in northern and eastern Maine and its since-closed Inland Hospital in Waterville nearly a year ago. The jury trial is scheduled to begin Monday.
It’s the latest in a string of high-profile medical malpractice trials this year involving the hospital system. It follows rare, recent verdicts in lawsuits against Northern Light where juries awarded large sums of money to the plaintiffs, including one in which an Aroostook County jury awarded $23.1 million in the second-largest medical malpractice verdict in Maine history.
Dr. Danielle Gagnon performed laparoscopic surgery in 2023 on Mitchell, who was then 40, to remove a cyst on her left ovary. Her bladder was instead removed, the lawsuit said. Mitchell alleged that Northern Light was medically negligent and that the hospital failed to obtain informed consent to remove her bladder.
It comes on the heels of the massive award to Robert Giordano of Madawaska, who claimed that doctors failed to identify bone calcification in Giordano’s spinal canal and follow emergency protocols, which led to his paralysis.
In April, an Eddington man was awarded $6.5 million after he was partially paralyzed because of negligence by the hospital system after Eastern Maine Medical Center did not operate on an emergency spinal injury for nearly 24 hours in 2021. An Ellsworth jury awarded $750,000 in February to a woman whose surgeon at Maine Coast Hospital left a gap in her femur.
Medical malpractice claims seldom go to trial. It’s even rarer for patients to win. Research conducted by the American Medical Association between 2016 and 2018 found only 6% of claims were decided by a trial verdict, and 89% were won by the defendant.
“When there are trials, it’s typically because the defendant just doesn’t offer anything at all or they offer an amount that is sufficiently modest that the plaintiff, and more importantly, their lawyer, figure ‘we might as well go to trial because there’s not enough money here,’” David Hyman, a healthcare regulation expert and Georgetown law professor, said.
It’s unclear if there’s anything driving the string of large awards in recent months or if the plaintiffs in those cases were offered settlements before their claims went to trial. Much of Maine’s judicial process for medical malpractice cases happens behind closed doors, making it difficult for the public to understand the leadup to a verdict.
“It’s almost like if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to see it or hear it, did it ever really happen?” lawyer Meryl Poulin, who represented the Eddington man, said of the Maine state law that requires medical malpractice cases to go through confidential litigation before they reach public court.
Lawyers from Berman and Simmons, the firm representing Mitchell in the case going to trial next week, were unavailable for comment Friday.
Northern Light Health spokesperson Suzanne Spruce wrote to the Bangor Daily News that while the healthcare system is willing to discuss how it handles medical malpractice lawsuits, “we have a case pending and prefer not to affect the jury’s right to hear evidence in the case in the courtroom as opposed to the news.”