On June 2, 2025, a New Mexico medical malpractice jury returned its verdict in excess of $40 million for a brain injured infant. The New Mexico medical malpractice lawsuit alleged that medical staff at Presbyterian Healthcare Services (Presbyterian Hospital) failed to timely diagnose and treat the infant’s low blood glucose levels after the child’s birth in April 2019, resulting in permanent injury including developmental delays, vision issues, and behavioral issues. The jury awarded close to $25 million for the child, who is now age 6, $825,000 for the child’s parents, and $15 million in punitive damages based on the alleged reckless or wanton conduct of two physicians and two registered nurses at the hospital.
The child was born three weeks prematurely in April 2019. The hospital allegedly failed to diagnose the newborn’s hypoglycemia that was due to high insulin levels. He was discharged from the hospital two days after his birth.
One week later after his birth, the infant became “fussy and febrile with less active feeding,” according to the lawsuit filed in 2022. He was readmitted to the same hospital. On the eighth day after his birth, he experienced seizures and suffered respiratory arrest. It was only after the effects on his heart and brain became evident that his blood glucose levels were tested and found to be critically low. The plaintiffs were able to show at trial that the hospital violated its own policy that premature newborns have their glucose levels tested within 24 hours after birth.
In response to the New Mexico medical malpractice jury’s award of compensatory and punitive damages, Presbyterian Healthcare Services issued a statement calling the verdict excessive: “While we respect the judicial process, we have serious concerns about this outcome and the unprecedented size of the damages awarded. We intend to pursue legal options to address what we consider to be an excessive judgment … Presbyterian is committed to providing safe, high-quality care to our communities.”
Neonatal Hypoglycemia
Healthy infants experience an expected drop in blood glucose concentrations immediately following birth as a part of the normal physiologic transition to extrauterine life. Abruptly clamping the umbilical cord at birth disrupts the infant’s connection to the placenta, upon which it relied to supply glucose and other metabolites necessary to meet its energy needs in utero. The continuous supply of exogenous intravenous glucose from the placenta suddenly ceases, and the infant’s blood glucose concentration declines in the first hours of life. For most healthy infants, this transitional neonatal hypoglycemia is brief, transient and most often asymptomatic.
Infants are at risk for more severe or prolonged hypoglycemia due to one or a combination of the following underlying mechanisms: insufficient glucose supply, with low glycogen or fat stores or poor mechanisms of glucose production; increased glucose utilization caused by excessive insulin production or increased metabolic demand; or the failure of counter-regulatory mechanisms (i.e., pituitary or adrenal failure).
Neonatal hypoglycemia most commonly affects the following groups of infants:
- Intrauterine growth restriction or small compared to gestational age infants
- Infants of diabetic mothers or large for gestational age infants
- Late-preterm infants (34 to 36.6 weeks gestational age)
If you or a loved one may have been injured as a result of medical negligence in New Mexico or in another U.S. state, you should promptly find a New Mexico medical malpractice attorney, or a medical malpractice attorney in your state, who may investigate your medical malpractice claim for you and represent you or your loved one in a medical malpractice case, if appropriate.
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