- Court
- Court of Appeals of Georgia
- Year
- 2025
- Case
- Wright v. Metro Ambulance Services, Inc.
- Citation
- 377 Ga. App. 516; 923 S.E.2d 89
- Decided
- October 30, 2025
Exclusion of rebuttal expert testimony about the Glasgow Coma Scale was harmless because the expert's video deposition already addressed the core oxygenation issue. Jury instructions applying the presumption of ordinary skill to paramedic treatment decisions were proper because those decisions required professional judgment.
Summary
The Court of Appeals of Georgia affirmed a jury verdict for Metro Ambulance Services in a wrongful-death case involving cardiac arrest during ambulance transport.
The plaintiff challenged exclusion of rebuttal expert testimony and several jury instructions. The court held that any error in excluding rebuttal was harmless and that the challenged instructions were proper because the allegations involved paramedic treatment decisions requiring professional judgment.
Issues Decided
Rebuttal expert testimony
Decision
The court held that excluding rebuttal testimony about the Glasgow Coma Scale did not require reversal.
Facts
Vanessa Banks was transported by ambulance after being pushed from a second-story window. A paramedic administered fentanyl and did not continuously monitor oxygen saturation with a pulse oximeter. Banks went into ventricular fibrillation during transport and died.
The plaintiff’s cardiology expert testified by video deposition that oxygen saturation cannot reliably be determined by observing breathing or speech and should be monitored by pulse oximeter. At trial, Metro’s expert used Glasgow Coma Scale observations to support the view that Banks was not in respiratory distress. The plaintiff sought live rebuttal testimony, which the trial court excluded.
Reasoning
The Court of Appeals concluded that the excluded rebuttal would have been cumulative in substance. The plaintiff’s expert had already testified that observational data could not reliably substitute for pulse oximetry, even if the defense expert later organized similar observations under the Glasgow Coma Scale label.
Jury instructions and negligence per se
Decision
The trial court properly instructed the jury on the presumption that professional services were performed with ordinary skill and properly refused negligence-per-se instructions based on emergency medical services regulations.
Facts
The plaintiff alleged failures involving oxygen monitoring, oxygen supplementation, cardiac monitoring, medication administration, and defibrillation. The plaintiff also requested negligence-per-se instructions based on broad EMS regulations.
Reasoning
The court reasoned that decisions about medical equipment, medication, oxygen supplementation, and defibrillation require professional judgment. That made the professional-negligence framework appropriate. The cited regulations were broad and would not have supplied clear negligence-per-se duties for the jury.
Commentary
The rebuttal ruling is a trial-practice warning. If an expert deposition already addresses the core medical principle, an appellate court may treat later excluded live rebuttal as harmless even when the defense uses new terminology at trial.
The jury-instruction ruling also matters for EMS cases. Allegations about equipment, medication, monitoring, and defibrillation are likely to be treated as professional-judgment issues. That makes standard-of-care proof central and makes negligence-per-se theories harder when the regulation is broad rather than specific.
