In a ruling that could have implications for other long-term care providers facing COVID-19-related liability cases, a jury has cleared a Tennessee nursing home of liability for the death of a patient that occurred during a major COVID-19 outbreak at the facility in 2020.

A jury found that while the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing in Gallatin, Tennessee, was negligent in the early days of the pandemic, it was not liable for the death of 89-year-old resident Clara Ruth Summers. As a result, the nursing home will not have to pay civil damages to Summers’ family, who filed the lawsuit.

Defense attorneys praised the jury’s verdict and said they believed it cleared the nursing home of any wrongdoing in the woman’s death.

“We are happy for all the staff who worked at the facility who were wrongly blamed for the first major COVID outbreak in the state that was not their fault,” said Howard Hayden, a lawyer for the nursing home. McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.

According to a report in The Guardian, a March 2020 COVID outbreak at the nursing home was a highly publicized event that resulted in 25 deaths and the National Guard having to arrive to conduct tests, leading to the evacuation of nearly 200 residents. Gallatin News.

Summers was the first resident to die from the outbreak, and her daughter filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that the facility’s gross negligence in responding to the outbreak led to her death.

In its verdict, the jury found the facility acted negligently during the outbreak but did not find that negligence led to Summers’ death.

Hayden said the jury found the facility had some staffing issues with its COVID screening process early in the pandemic, but noted that most COVID screening guidelines from the CDC and state regulators had not yet been developed, and there was no widely available COVID testing at the time.

“The jury found that these issues were not the cause of this poor woman’s death,” he said.

More cases ahead

Despite the verdict, the facility still faces lawsuits from families of patients who died as a result of the epidemic.

Attorney Clint Kelly, who represented Summers’ family and is also representing 24 other families who have filed lawsuits against the nursing home, said he was disappointed with the jury’s verdict. But he believes his team proved the facility acted negligently and plans to pursue other cases.

“I know this was the first case in Tennessee where a jury found that a nursing home was negligent in failing to properly respond to COVID and protect its residents,” Kelly said. McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.“This verdict tells me I’m on the right track.”

Hayden hopes the jury verdict will discourage plaintiffs’ lawyers from other jurisdictions from filing COVID-related cases against nursing homes that have done their best to control the spread of the disease during the unprecedented pandemic. He said this is at least the third case he knows of where juries have ruled in favor of nursing homes in COVID-related wrongful death cases.

“I don’t know of a single case where a plaintiff has been successful in any of these cases,” he said.
One of the first and most closely watched decisions in a COVID-19 lawsuit involved a nursing home where the first widespread outbreak of the virus was discovered in early 2020. A federal jury ruled that Life Care Centers of Kirkland, WA, was not liable for the deaths of two residents who succumbed to the novel coronavirus. Other providers have also been found not liable in lawsuits across the country, although many lawsuits are still pending in various jurisdictions.