In Re P.w. v. Children's Hospital…

Summary

The court held that a hospital caring for a known suicidal patient in its exclusive custody under high-suicide precautions could not assert comparative negligence or assumption of risk when the patient attempted suicide and suffered injury. The hospital's assumed duty to prevent the very self-destructive conduct that caused the injury subsumed the patient's duty of self-care, making the patient's capacity for negligence irrelevant. The court declined to reach the merits of the hospital's discovery challenge because the discovery ruling would not significantly impair the hospital's ability to litigate and the comparative-fault defenses had been eliminated.