In Gutierrez v. Tostado, the Supreme Court yesterday held that the one-year statute of limitations in Code of Civil Procedure section 340.5 for an action “against a health care provider based upon such person’s alleged professional negligence,” doesn’t apply in an action by a driver whose vehicle was rear-ended by an ambulance transporting a patient.
The court’s unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero concluded that, instead of that special limitation of the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, the two-year general negligence time period applies when “a plaintiff sues a health care provider for breach of a duty owed to the public generally, as opposed to a violation of professional obligations owed to patients.” The court said that the “circumscribed definition [of “professional negligence” in section 340.5] suggests the statute is only concerned with injuries resulting directly from the negligent rendering of medical care, as opposed to all injuries that might occur during or that arise out of the provision of medical care.”
Although it didn’t decide whether the patient riding in the ambulance would have faced the shorter MICRA statute of limitations had they sued for injuries sustained in the accident, and it said that “the plaintiff’s status as a patient or nonpatient is not necessarily determinative,” the court did go on to state, “The possibility of different plaintiffs being subject to different statutes of limitation is neither unworkable nor inherently unfair.”
The court reversed a 2-1 published Sixth District Court of Appeal opinion. It disapproved the Second District, Division Eight, opinion in Canister v. Emergency Ambulance Service, Inc. (2008) 160 Cal.App.4th 388 and the First District, Division Five, opinion in Lopez v. American Medical Response West (2023) 89 Cal.App.5th 336. Canister and Lopez “were incorrect,” the Supreme Court said, “to the extent they suggest that a plaintiff’s claim sounds in professional negligence merely because the plaintiff’s injuries ‘occur[ed] during the rendering of services’ to a patient.”
The Supreme Court denied review in Canister. (See: Disapprovals of review-denied opinions show the Supreme Court is not an error-correction court.) There was no petition for review in Lopez.
