A Philadelphia jury on Friday afternoon handed down a $15.2 million verdict in a medical malpractice case where the body of a 13-month-old child undergoing heart surgery was cooled too fast, leading to neurological damage.
Thomas Kline of Kline & Specter, the lawyer for plaintiff Alec Sears and his parents, said that the team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, led by pediatric heart surgeon Marshall Jacobs, took only nine minutes to take the boy’s body temperature down from 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to about 63 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius to 17.2 degrees Celsius). The standard of care called for a 20-minute cooling-off period, Kline said.
