In Pennsylvania, a decision to dismiss a case over a wrongful death suit regarding an alleged missed cervical cancer diagnosis has been reversed on appeal, giving a family a chance to have their complaints heard once again.

The decision was made by a three-judge panel on April 10, in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. Now, the wrongful death lawsuit has been sent back to the York County Court of Common Pleas.

The wrongful death Quest Diagnostics lawsuit was filed by Marcella B. in June 2013 over testing done by Quest Diagnostics Clinical Laboratories Inc. for Nicole B. Nicole died in April 2015. Marcella alleged that Quest Diagnostics engaged in medical malpractice when it failed to diagnose her daughter’s cervical cancer. 

After Nicole’s death in 2015, Marcella moved the court to substitute herself for her deceased daughter. The substitution apparently raised no issue until 2017, when Quest Diagnostics filed a motion in opposition to Marcella’s claims, requesting to have the wrongful death lawsuit dismissed. This request was initially granted in December 2017 by the York County Court of Common Pleas. The court’s reason for the dismissal was that Marcella failed to bring her motion for substitution to the court’s attention.

Marcella fought back against this determination, asking for this dismissal to be reversed. This request was granted, and the superior court found that Marcella had filed her Quest Diagnostics lawsuit soon enough.

According to the court, while the statute of limitations “requires that an estate be raised, letters of administration to be issued, and a personal representative to be appointed within one year of the suggestion of death being filed,” Marcella’s Quest Diagnostics lawsuit was filed within that time frame.

Further supporting the court’s decision to grant Marcella’s appeal, Judge Emeritus Kate Ford Elliot wrote that “in fact, the substitution of party was filed and time stamped Feb. 22, 2016, also well within one year of decedent’s death, even though the motion to substitute is not governed by the time limitation of Section 3375.”

This is not the first time that Quest Diagnostics has faced medical malpractice claims. In Ireland, a cervical cancer screening program called CervicalCheck contracts with U.S. laboratories to screen pap smears for cervical cancer. Sadly, there has reportedly been a scandal of these tests being misread by laboratory technicians, and people are given false negative results.

A false negative result in a pap smear is dangerous because it can prevent people from being able to treat their cervical cancer in time, which can in some cases, cost them their lives.

According to the Irish Times, one of these laboratories that works with the CervicalCheck program is Quest Diagnostics, and they have faced medical malpractice lawsuits over allegedly false negatives delivered to Irish patients who used the Cervical Check program. 

In one case, the laboratories allegedly failed to correctly report, diagnose, and interpret pap smears of a woman taken in 2009 and 2012, leading her to believe that she did not have cervical cancer when in reality, she did. Allegedly, because of the laboratories’ mistakes, her cancer went unidentified until 2014, by which point it had spread.

Reportedly, her cancer is now so severe that she is not expected to live longer than two years, reports the Irish Times. She claims that the laboratories’ mistakes robbed her of the chance to identify and treat her cervical cancer earlier.