Opinion ID: 1102212
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: overview of hernandez

Text: In Hernandez, the plaintiff discovered the alleged act of medical malpractice on March 16, 1981, and suit was filed in the district court against the Lafayette Bone & Joint Clinic and three physicians on March 15, 1982. The following week on March 22, 1982, the plaintiff requested a medical review panel. On July 12, 1982, the trial court, acting on the defendant's dilatory exception of prematurity, dismissed the suit without prejudice. The medical review panel acted on August 9, 1983, and notified plaintiff of its decision on August 12, 1983. Four months later, on December 16, 1983, the plaintiff filed a second suit against the defendants. After the defendants filed a peremptory exception of prescription to the second suit, the trial court found that the plaintiff's claim was prescribed. The Court of Appeal, Third Circuit, reversed. The Third Circuit held that the plaintiff's filing of his law suit on March 15, 1982, interrupted prescription under La.Civ.Code art. 3462 which provides as follows: Prescription is interrupted when the owner commences action against the possessor, or when the obligee commences action against the obligor, in a court of competent jurisdiction and venue. If action is commenced in an incompetent court, or in an improper venue, prescription is interrupted only as to a defendant served by process within the prescriptive period. It further held that under La.Civ.Code art. 3466 prescription effectively begins to run anew from the last day of interruption. However, it determined that the one-year prescriptive period for medical malpractice claims did not begin to run anew because under La.R.S. 40:1299.47(A)(2)(a) prescription was suspended at the time plaintiff's suit was dismissed without prejudice. La.R.S. 40:1299.47(A)(2)(a) provides: The filing of the request for a review of a claim shall suspend the time within which suit must be instituted, in accordance with this Part, until ninety days following notification... to the claimant or his attorney of the issuance of the opinion by the medical review panel, in the case of those health care providers covered by this Part,.... Furthermore, based upon La.Civ.Code art. 3472 [t]he period of suspension is not counted toward accrual of prescription and did not commence again until the period of suspension terminated. Accordingly, the Hernandez court reasoned, on the basis of La. Civ.Code art. 3466 and La.R.S. 40:1299.47(A)(2)(a), that the one-year prescriptive period was tolled until ninety days after the plaintiff's notification of the medical review panel's decision; not until that time had run did the one-year prescriptive period begin anew. Therefore, the appellate court concluded that the plaintiff's second suit was not prescribed because it had been filed within one-year following the termination of the suspension of prescription.