A lower court should not have ordered a nursing home to produce resident information in a wrongful death case against it after a resident’s fatal slip and all, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal ruled on March 24.
The Cross Care Center requested a quash of a subpoena filed by Michaele M. Moore, on behalf of the personal representative of The Estate of Jennie Richard. One set of documents was the names, addresses and next of kin of the residents who were there in the unit when the deceased died on Sept. 16, 2016. The other set asked the nursing home to issue “copies of the Section Z of the Minimum Data Set (MDS) reports for all residents present at the facility,” on the day of Richard’s passing, according to the lawsuit.
Judges Scott Makar, Ross L. Bilbrey, and Harvey L. Jay, II concurred on the case.
When it comes to the first request concerning information on the residents that were present, the judges pointed out that the estate’s complaint alleged that there were no witnesses to the fall.
"We fail to see the relevance of the names of all the unit’s residents when no resident, by the estate’s singular allegation, witnessed the fall,” the appeals court determined.
On top of that, article I, section 23 of the Florida Constitution considers the information the estate asked for “constitutionally protected, private details,” based on the opinion. A state-level regulation, section 400.022 of Florida Statutes also rules that information for residents of a nursing home, such as personal and medical records, are to be kept private.
While the estate said that it’s not asking for medical records, the appeals court disagreed and said the “all documents” phrase in the documents request would include medical reports.
Even though the first request for reconsideration on the subpoena was denied, the second one was granted.
“Unlike the first order, the second order does seek to discover relevant evidence—or evidence that would lead to relevant evidence—in the form of patient information intended to aid the estate’s expert witness or witnesses in forming an opinion concerning the estate’s allegation of understaffing in the nursing home at the time of the decedent’s fall,” the appeals court determined.