Yale has settled a large lawsuit with dozens of fertility patients who claimed that they endured egg retrieval procedures that were excruciatingly painful following one nurse secretly swapping out their anesthesia for just saline.
While the total amount of the settlement was not released, lawyers for the plaintiffs said it was “substantial,” according to The New York Times. The attorneys had originally proposed a settlement totaling about $2 million for every patient, according to last year’s court filings.
A Yale spokeswoman, Karen Peart, commented:
“This mutual agreement allows both parties to move forward and begin healing.”
There were 93 patients who were involved in this settlement who were seen in 2020 at the Yale Fertility Center. Many of the stories they had were made public during a 2023 podcast that was very popular and was produced by The Times and Serial Productions.
The lawsuits alleged that the patients had intensely painful egg retrieval processes. These procedures are typically not painful and are short. They are considered surgery, and they use fentanyl as an anesthetic in most cases.
Many of the patients complained to Yale about the pain, but they were ignored.
It turns out that a nurse who was working for Yale at the time had a drug addiction and tampered with nearly all of the fentanyl supply that the clinic had.
Yale conducted an investigation after the fact that discovered that between June and October of 2020, nearly 75% of the fentanyl that was given to patients at Yale was either replaced with saline completely or at least diluted.
In May of 2021, Donna Monticone, the nurse, was sentenced to four weekends of incarceration as well as three months on house arrest for the incidents.
Two years ago, Yale University agreed to a settlement with the Department of Justice following an investigation the DOJ conducted into whether Yale failed to keep its supply of fentanyl secure. As part of that settlement, Yale paid $308,000 to the DOJ.
A separate audit conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration identified in excess of 600 discrepancies in Yale’s record keeping for all controlled substances, including both ketamine and fentanyl.
Yale isn’t the only health-care facility that has faced lawsuits recently over fentanyl that was stolen.
Just last week, an Oregon hospital was sued by the families of 16 patients who died after a nurse swapped out their fentanyl with unsterile tap water. Those patients who died contracted bacterial infections from the tap water that was given to them intravenously.
The experiences that the Yale patients went through gained national attention from “The Retrievals” podcast. Patients described what they went through, and how they were screaming in pain while the procedure was going on.
One of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Joshua Koskoff, said a key factor in the lawsuit settlement was that Yale gave them assurances that the clinic had already initiated changes that would prevent something similar from happening in the future.
As he said:
“The women in this case were absolutely insistent that there would be no monetary settlement until the university had addressed all the problems that resulted in this occurring.”
