On April 11, 2025, a Baltimore City medical malpractice jury returned its verdict in an amount just over $8 million for the medical malpractice wrongful death of a 43-year-old public school teacher and father of three children, the youngest being four months old at the time of his death.
The man was planning to have bariatric surgery that required that he undergo pre-surgery medical clearance. As part of the medical clearance for surgery, he went to the hospital to have an endoscopy procedure. He was not given general anesthesia during the endoscopy but instead was under twilight sleep sedation during the procedure.
The anesthesiologist who was participating in the low-risk endoscopy allegedly failed to timely and appropriately respond to man’s falling oxygen saturations, respirations, and then his dropping heart rate, which began shortly after the endoscopy procedure began, and lasted from eight to twelve minutes during which time the anesthesiologist continued to bag-mask the patient but failed to intubate. After at least eight minutes, another anesthesiologist responded to the procedure room after being called in to assist, and immediately intubated the man. It was not established why the first anesthesiologist failed to timely intubate.
The plaintiffs’ economist testified during trial that the economic damages suffered by the plaintiffs were between $1.5 million and $1.6 million.
The Baltimore medical malpractice verdict was against the original anesthesiologist and his medical group. The hospital where the endoscopy was performed was originally named as a defendant but was dismissed from the case before trial.
Endoscopy And Fatal Events
A retrospective cohort study of fatal adverse events causally related to endoscopy at Denver Health Medical Center and the University of Colorado Hospital from 2011 to 2020 found that fatal endoscopic adverse events (AEs) were rare but tended to occur in older patients with major comorbidities. Most deaths occurred from aspiration pneumonia, cardiac arrest, or perforation-related sepsis within one week of the procedure.
There were 146,010 GI endoscopy procedures were performed at the two medical facilities from January 2011 to January 2020. The median patient age was 70; 57% were male. Thirty-one deaths were identified, 28 of which were attributed to endoscopy, yielding a procedure-related fatality rate of 0.018%. Procedures included 11 EGDs, one colonoscopy, two flexible sigmoidoscopies, six ERCPs, seven upper EUS, and one PEG-J tube placement. Specific causes of death included aspiration in four patients (14%); cardiac arrest or myocardial infarction in seven patients (25%); perforation in nine patients (32%); bleeding in four patients (14%); cholangitis or sepsis without perforation in three patients (11%); and acute pancreatitis in one patient (3.6%).
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