An Allegheny County judge has dismissed a hospital and a personnel placement company from a lawsuit that claimed the two were liable for a man's infection with hepatitis because the hospital and staffing agency allegedly knew a former lab technician was using hospital needles to support his drug addiction and did not prevent him from working at other hospitals.
In Walters v. UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, Court of Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. held that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's failure to report lab technician David Kwiatkowski's theft of narcotics from the hospital — and his drug use — did not impose a duty on the hospital to patients who came in contact with Kwiatkowski in the future. Wettick reasoned that imposing a third-party duty of care in this case would run counter to recent state Supreme Court jurisprudence on this issue in Seebold v. Prison Health Services, because one employee's error — not reporting Kwiatkowski under the Controlled Substances Act — should not expose an institution to "limitless" liability.
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