John Armour, Individually and as Personal Representative of the Estate of Judith Armour v. David Bader, M.D.

Syllabus

The plaintiff, John Armour, individually and as personal representative of the Estate of Judith Armour, appealed from the denial of his motion for a new trial following a verdict for the defendants David Bader, M.D., Neil Brandon, M.D., and South County Hospital Healthcare System d.b.a. South County Cardiology in a medical negligence case. The plaintiff challenged the trial justice's refusal to give a jury instruction pursuant to the instruction affirmed by this Court in Oliveira v. Jacobson, 846 A.2d 822 (R.I. 2004). The plaintiff also claimed that the trial justice erred in permitting the defendants' standard-of-care expert to utilize a referring doctor's records as a basis for his opinions and in limiting cross-examination of that expert regarding a particular study. The Supreme Court held that the trial justice erred in denying the plaintiff's motion for a new trial because (1) the jury should have been instructed that it would be improper to consider the nonparty referring physician's conduct in assessing the defendants' negligence in this case (2) allowing the defendants' standard-of-care expert to rely on the specific content of the referring physician's records, a primary-care provider, to support the defendant-cardiologists' actions on the date of the decedent's stress test, when they were admittedly not available to the defendants, was an abuse of discretion and (3) it was an error to preclude the plaintiff's attorney from referencing a particular study by name on cross-examination of the defendants' expert because, although outside the scope of direct examination, it would have tended to contradict the expert's testimony that the decedent was stable on the date of her stress echocardiogram. Accordingly, the Court vacated the judgment of the Superior Court and remanded the case for a new trial.