Hit-and-Run Injury After Discharge While Medicated

Attorney Answer

You may have two claims here, running on two different clocks, and the shorter clock is the one against the facility. Getting them separated is the first useful thing to do.

The driver first. Vehicle Code § 20001(a) requires the driver of a vehicle involved in an accident that injures someone other than the driver to stop immediately at the scene; leaving carries county jail time and a fine of $1,000 to $10,000 under subdivision (b), and more where the injury is permanent and serious. That case belongs to the prosecutor and will not pay for your leg. Where the driver is never identified, the usual route to compensation is uninsured motorist coverage. Insurance Code § 11580.2 requires every California bodily-injury liability policy to carry uninsured motorist coverage unless it is deleted by written agreement on the forms the statute prescribes. It is bodily-injury coverage, so it fits a broken tibia. Whether you are a covered person — under your own policy, or a resident relative's — and what a hit-and-run claim requires under that policy is something a lawyer has to read the policy to answer.

The facility is the harder and more interesting question. The closest California authority is Myers v. Quesenberry, 144 Cal. App. 3d 888 (Ct. App. 1983), where the Court of Appeal held that a physician's duty to warn a patient not to drive while medication impaired him extended to a third person the patient then injured. I want to be straight with you about what that does and does not do. Myers is about a person the impaired patient hurt, not about the patient's own injuries after being released. Your situation — a facility that administered a sedating medication and then let you walk out while you were blacked out — is a related question, not the same one. It is worth a lawyer's evaluation of the records. It is not a case that is already decided in your favor.

One more thing that cuts both ways: California is a pure comparative fault state. If some share of responsibility is attributed to you, the recovery is reduced in proportion to that share and is never eliminated (Civil Code § 1714(a); Daly v. General Motors Corp., 20 Cal. 3d 725 (1978)).

What you can do

1. Request your complete record from the facility, including the discharge paperwork and the medication administration record showing what was given, at what dose, and at what time.

2. Get the police report for the hit-and-run and its report number. If no report was ever made, report it now.

3. Notify your own auto insurer in writing — or a resident relative's, if you were covered under it — that there may be an uninsured motorist claim. Policies impose their own notice conditions, and late notice is a fight you do not need.

4. Keep everything about the tibia: emergency records, any surgical report, follow-ups, bills, and time missed from work.

5. Ask a local lawyer to look at both tracks together, and tell them the date of the discharge — the deadline for a claim against a health care provider is shorter than the ordinary one and it starts differently.

6. Most lawyers offer a brief initial call at no cost, and a few minutes on your specific facts with a local attorney is worth more than any general guidance, including this page.

⏱ Time limits apply. A claim arising from the collision runs on Code of Civil Procedure § 335.1's two years. A claim against a health care provider runs instead on Code of Civil Procedure § 340.5, which sets three years from the date of injury or one year from when the claimant discovered, or with reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury — whichever comes first. Noneconomic damages against a provider are also capped by Civil Code § 3333.2, whose statutory base rises every January 1 under the 2022 amendments, so the figure depends on the year. Which deadline governs which claim, and where each falls, depends on your facts. Have a local attorney confirm them — do not count the months yourself.