Washington Case Brings Some Seriousness to the Term "Crazy Personal Injury Claims"
A Washington Court of Appeals has ruled against employees of a psychiatric hospital near Tacoma who claimed that the hospital intended to injure them when it failed to address a history of attacks on staff members by criminally-insane patients. Employees of Western State Hospital alleged in personal injury lawsuits that they were injured by patients during various attacks from 2001-2004, and argued that the hospital was negligent in not training them for "certain" incidents in the future.
Personal injury lawyers for these employees specifically contended that this history of patient assaults was proof enough to the hospital that future attacks were certain to happen. In not providing employees with training to defend themselves for future assaults, the hospital willfully disregarded the problem, according to the plaintiffs. The court did not agree and wrote that these types of assaults were foreseeable but not certain. The Appeals Court's decision reaffirmed a previous Superior Court ruling on these claims.