Thanks to various commenters from the prior post for the links.

Apparently the patient didn’t want any student touching her. More details:

Mullins sued because several weeks before the procedure, her surgeon, Dr. Marvin E. Eastlund provided her with an informed consent document on which she indicated she did not want health care students in the operating room.

“Whose responsibility is it when a patient says they don’t want a learner to ensure that?” Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard asked.

The injury occurred when the student tried to intubate Mullins. An intubation is a common medical procedure where a tube is inserted into a patient’s throat to ensure that airways remain open during surgery.

But the damage required a second surgery and required Mullins to spend more than a month in the hospital recovering.

Mullins also signed a document from anesthesiologist Dr. Kathryn Carboneau that said only Carboneau or “a physician privileged to practice” anesthesia care would perform specified duties.

Also, the student was studying to be an EMT and the intubation was part of her training. This case was her first live intubation:

VanHoey made two attempts to intubate Ruth using a laryngoscope. After her second attempt, both Dr. Carboneau and Dr. Eastlund saw blood on the type of the laryngoscope, but apparently, the presence of blood on the laryngoscope following intubation is not unusual, and neither doctor was alarmed at the time. After VanHoey failed to intubate Ruth successfully, Dr. Carboneau performed the procedure and completed Ruth’s anesthesia.

On December 6, 2000, two days after Ruth’s hysterectomy, the attending nurse noticed that Ruth’s face and neck were beginning to swell. After running some tests, Dr. Carboneau, Dr. Eastlund, and Dr. John Csicsko, a cardiovascular surgeon, met with Ruth to explain that VanHoey had lacerated Ruth’s esophagus when she attempted to perform the intubation procedure. The doctors explained to Ruth that she needed to undergo another surgical procedure to repair the damage to her esophagus. Although Ruth was reluctant to undergo another surgical procedure because she had just undergone the hysterectomy, the doctors strongly encouraged her to have the procedure that day because waiting until the next day could have been fatal. Thus, on the same day, Ruth had surgery to repair her esophagus, and as a result of this second procedure, she had to remain in the hospital for over a month until her dismissal on January 5, 2001.

More than the issue of battery, is the issue of consent – which the patient clearly stated that she didn’t want any teaching to be done on her.