Chief Bankruptcy Judge Robert H. Jacobvitz of Albuquerque, N.M., awarded three other former patients another $10 million in damages, after finding that Quorum Health Resources of Tennessee breached its duty to prevent harm to patients at Gerald Champion Regional Hospital in Alamogordo from 2007 to 2008, the Albuquerque Journal reported. The damage assessment against Quorum, which supplied top executives for the hospital, is the first time in the protracted litigation that a judge has determined the amount of harm suffered by individual plaintiffs. Patient malpractice and negligence claims, which grew to nearly 80 over the years, forced the hospital to seek bankruptcy court protection in 2011. A partial settlement involving the physicians, Christian Schlicht and Frank Bryant, and the hospital totalled more than $33 million. But for years, Quorum resisted settling the cases. In late 2016, Jacobvitz determined that the hospital management firm was 16.5 percent culpable for its negligence. Last summer, the judge held a trial to assess damages, beginning with four of the former patients. Quorum attorneys argued that their pain, numbness, weakness and other debilitating symptoms were the result of prior back problems — not the bone cement injections. But Jacobvitz, in his ruling on Jan. 30, concluded that the pre-existing conditions were aggravated by the harmful cement treatments and that the four were entitled to damages that reflected the extent of the aggravation.
