April 2010

Mild traumatic brain injury sometimes seems like an oxymoron. It’s only mild if it happens to someone you don’t know.

The Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta, together with the American College of Emergency Physicians, recently released updated guidelines for physicians in assessing patients with suspected mild traumatic brain injury.  The release includes:

This gives ER doctors and other practitioners easy access to the essentials of the most recently revised clinical policy when they need it fast.

An Atlanta area woman was just sitting at a traffic light on Good Friday in her Honda Civic when the air bag deployed spontaneously and a shard of metal from it sliced her carotid artery. Fortunately, she survived.

Honda issued a recall last February on some models of its car because of a defect with the driver’s side airbag. In that recall, metal pieces from a part in the airbag could cause injury or death to the driver.  Of course, Honda denies that this incident was in any way related to the recall. Right.

Coincidentally, a consumer survey released this week found that slightly more Americans now say the United States makes better-quality vehicles than Asia does.

On April 22nd, a Henry County police officer was killed in a traffic accident in Butts County on his way to work.   Officer  James "Jimmy’ Franklin Carter Jr., was an 11-year veteran of the Henry County Police Department, worked in Uniform Patrol, as a detective in the Criminal Investigations Division, as a K-9 officer, and as a Field Training Officer.The incident is being investigated by the Georgia State Patrol.

This week a carpet mill worker at the Beaulieu plant in Murray County, Georgia, was injured falling into a tufting machine. He was airlifted to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga.

Workers compensation provides the exclusive remedy of an injured worker against the employer in work accidents.

However, sometimes an injured worker can recover additional compensation for an injury from a third party, such as an equipment manufacturer. Since Georgia law was changed in 2005 to require apportionment of damages among both parties and non-parties to a lawsuit, that has been made more difficult as an equipment manufacturer can try to shift more blame to an employer’s negligent maintenance, training and supervision.

However, every case is different.  Over the years we have successfully represented workers injured by carpet mill machinery, poultry processing equipment, commercial bakery equipment, plastic extrusion machines, wood chippers,  forklift trucks, and a wide variety of other industrial and commercial equipment.

Manufacturers of industrial equipment may be liable to injured workers under legal doctrines including negligent design; failure to adequately test and inspect;failure to provide adequate instructions, warnings and labels; and failure to issue an adequate recall notice.

In one carpet mill case we handled, the manufacturer of a laminating machine had installed an emergency stop cord switch backwards — contrary to instructions from the switch manufacturer — and failed to install any safety stop cord on the side of the machine where a worker was most likely to fall in.

 

Here’s a proposal on which the legal, medical and business communities in Georgia should be able to agree.

SR 277, now pending in the Georgia House of Representatives, would initiate a $10 surcharge on car tags to fund a network of trauma centers across Georgia.

Today, Georgia has just 15 trauma centers — hospitals with the surgeons, specialists and technology needed to treat patients with life-threatening injuries sustained on the highway, in the workplace or at home.

These centers are scattered across the state, leaving huge gaps in between. In fact, more than 1 million Georgians now live 50, 75 or even 100 miles from the nearest trauma center. Add to that those who travel through our state each day and even more people are outside of the critical 60-minute window — the “golden hour” — immediately following injury, during which a patient must receive appropriate care to avoid disability or death.

This shortage of trauma centers overburdens the 15 that exist today, which together treat more than 10,000 cases a year. It strains the coffers of the cities and counties that are helping those 15 centers stay afloat. And it makes businesses think twice about locating where employees can’t get the care they need in the event of an emergency at home, at work or traveling between.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce, hospitals and doctors have joined in supporting this proposal. It has not been brought to the attention of the State Bar’s legislative committee, as it is arguably not germane to the purposes of the unified Bar and therefore may not fit within constraints on the types of legislative issues on which the Bar can take positions.  However, Georgia trial lawyers should support it too as it is critical to preserving the lives of our friends, neighbors, family members and, yes, our clients, who suffer traumatic injuries in rural areas of the state.