Thanks for visiting! Welcome to a new way to research case law. You are viewing a free summary from Descrybe.ai. For citation and good law / bad law checking, legal issue analysis, and other advanced tools, explore our Legal Research Toolkit — not free, but close.
Hryniak v. Nathan Littauer Hospital Ass'n
Citations: 86 A.D.2d 699; 446 N.Y.S.2d 558; 1982 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 15247
Court: Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York; January 13, 1982; New York; State Appellate Court
An appeal was filed against a March 23, 1981 order from the Supreme Court at Special Term, which granted the defendant hospital's motion to dismiss the plaintiff's complaint. The plaintiff claimed that the hospital's inability to produce X-rays taken on December 14, 1977, hindered her ability to prove her malpractice case against her surgeon. The plaintiff had been admitted to the hospital for a fractured knee, with X-rays taken on both December 14 and December 26, 1977. After requesting all medical records and X-rays in December 1980, the plaintiff received the December 26 X-rays but not those from December 14. Consequently, she could not submit these X-rays to a medical malpractice review panel, which subsequently found no evidence of negligence, leading to the current action. The defendant hospital moved to dismiss the complaint under CPLR 3211 (subd [a], par 7) for failure to state a cause of action. The Special Term granted the motion, and the plaintiff appealed. The court noted that for a negligence claim to be valid, the plaintiff must establish that the defendant owed a duty, breached that duty, and that the plaintiff suffered damages as a result. The court found that the plaintiff did not demonstrate any duty owed by the hospital to preserve the X-rays and failed to show that she suffered damages due to the alleged negligence. The order was affirmed, with costs awarded to the defendant, and all justices concurred.