Rochester Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
A statute of limitations is a law that limits the time period within which you may sue a person or company. The New York medical malpractice statute imposes a 30-month time limit from the date of the malpractice or from the end of continuous treatment. However, the New York legislature recently passed Lavern’s Law to, among other things, give people who receive a cancer misdiagnosis a more reasonable time period to assert a malpractice claim.
The New York legislature first considered revising the medical malpractice statute after the death of a New York woman, whose cancer was misdiagnosed on two separate occasions. The woman visited Kings County Hospital with chest pain and received an X-ray. She was sent home after a first-year resident told her it looked fine. Later, she began having difficulty breathing. Again, this was misdiagnosed with asthma symptoms. Finally, two years after the initial visit, doctors reexamined her old X-ray and noticed a small mass. By this time, the mass had developed into lung cancer and spread throughout her body. She died approximately a year later.
The woman’s lawsuit for medical malpractice was unsuccessful because the statute of limitations had expired by the time she filed suit. New York is currently one of only six states that starts the statute of limitations when the medical mistake is made, not the moment the mistake is discovered. Lavern’s Law would change this feature of the current law so that the timing for cancer misdiagnoses would begin at the moment of discovery.
