Closed-loop bowel obstruction allegedly not treated as a surgical emergency at Emory

This complaint states as follows: Rebecca Sloan went to the Emergency Department with what a CT scan showed to be a suspected closed-loop bowel obstruction. Such an obstruction is a surgical emergency. The consulting surgeon, Dr. Cheickna Diarra, failed to treat it as an emergency. Instead, he left Rebecca to wait overnight. The next morning, the oncoming surgeon, Dr. Darryl Tookes, also failed to promptly attend to Rebecca, leading to additional delay. These delays resulted in Rebecca losing 40% of her small intestine. Emory Healthcare contributed to the harm through administrative negligence, including failure to address nighttime care problems, ineffective patient hand-off systems, lack of a culture of safety, inadequate training on medical errors and patient rights, lack of protocols for urgent CT scans, insufficient nurse training on medical issues, and failure to implement proper patient grievance and sentinel event processes. These administrative failures, both simple and sophisticated, contributed to the delays and errors that ultimately harmed Rebecca.