LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - California’s strict medical-malpractice law with a one-year statute of limitations and limiting noneconomic damages to $250,000 doesn’t apply in the case of a mental hospital accused of allowing one of its workers to sexually abuse patients, an appeals court ruled.
The Second District Court of Appeal upheld $13.4 million in damages awarded to three women who accused a man coworkers nicknamed “Rapey Juan” of abusing them while they were being treated at Aurora Vista Del Mar hospital. Aurora is one of 11 mental facilities operated by Signature Healthcare Services, which is owned by Dr. Soon Kim.
The jury found Aurora and Signature 65% at fault under California’s Elder Abuse Act. The hospital company appealed, arguing the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975 should have applied. That law covers negligence by licensed “healthcare providers,” including hospitals. Under MICRA, the hospitals argued, the plaintiffs’ claims would have been barred because they filed their lawsuits more than a year after their claimed abuse.
The appeals court rejected those argument in a Dec. 20 decision, ruling that MICRA only covers professional negligence and the plaintiffs had proven Aurora and Signature acted with recklessness, a higher standard allowing liability under the Elder Abuse Act.
Aurora hired Juan Valencia as an unlicensed mental health worker in 2011, despite the fact he had been arrested in 1989 for sex crimes including unlawful intercourse with a minor. Valencia would have been required to register as a sex offender for one of the more serious charges but that was dismissed and he pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sex with a minor.
Aurora hired an investigator to conduct a background check but state law prohibits consumer agencies from looking back more than seven years, so it wasn’t informed of the arrest. Valencia was given several hours of training including “three to five minutes” on countertransference, or the tendency of workers to form emotional bonds with patients.
Sure enough, Valencia was fired in 2013 after a student nurse saw him at a party with patient Danielle W., who had been discharged from the hospital the day before. Danielle and two other patients sued the hospital in 2015, accusing Valencia and his employer of sexual assault, emotional distress and failure to protect them under the Elder Abuse Act.
The jury awarded each millions of dollars in damages after hearing testimony that the facility was understaffed, male employees could spend up to 20 minutes unsupervised in a female patient’s room if the door was open, and that coworkers had told supervisors Valencia was known as “Rapey Juan.”
The hospital had been on notice about sexual abuse after a 2004 incident involving a 17-year-old girl, plaintiff attorneys argued, and it would have uncovered Valencia’s criminal past if it hired only certified nursing assistants who are fingerprinted and licensed.
Aurora argued the lawsuit was over professional negligence covered by MICRA. The appeals court agreed with the trial court that the Elder Abuse Act covered the claims related to recklessness.
A “health care provider” is any person licensed to provide health care services including a health facility.
The legislature made it clear MICRA and the Elder Abuse Act were “separate and distinct,” the court ruled. The California Supreme Court enforced this distinction in a 1999 decision, upholding damages and attorneys’ fees in an Elder Abuse Act lawsuit against a nursing home for abandoning an 88-year-old woman. The court said MICRA only covers professional negligence, while the Elder Abuse Act covers recklessness involving a “conscious course of action.”
“Aurora and Signature were well aware that their female patients were particularly vulnerable to sexual predation by male mental health workers,” the appeals court ruled. “That male workers were allowed 20 minutes alone with a vulnerable female psychiatric patient in a room secluded from view would by itself support a finding of recklessness.”
Aurora also argued it had no right, and thus no duty, to look up criminal records past seven years. But the jury was instructed the seven-year limit applies only to consumer reporting agencies, the court said. California’s labor code prohibits hospitals from asking employees about arrests that didn’t result in conviction but allows them to ask the same question of job applicants, the court noted.
The appeals court also rejected a challenge to jury’s award of only 30% fault to Valencia, citing a 1994 appeals court decision rejecting a jury’s finding of 99% liability against Los Angeles County and only 1% for the grandmother who intentionally scalded a child. The court objected to the magnitude of the disparity, the appeals court ruled, not the idea of apportioning the majority of the blame on the county.