This was a very sad and hard story to read, and somehow I hope Patricia Martin hired a good lawyer and sued the butts off of everyone involved!
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Harvard and Yale Medical schools did a multi-year study on malpractice claims around 1992 0r '93.  What they learned surprised me greatly (I was in law school at the time).  Using autopsy data they determined that 12% of malpractice cases did not meet the criteria of malpractice.  More surprising was that they found 43% of cases where they determined malpractice had been committed no lawsuit was ever filed.  This in spite of the presumption that people were thought to be by and large, lawsuit crazy.  Contacting next of kin and family what they learned as the reason why no lawsuit had ever been filed was that most people respected the medical profession so much they assumed honest mistake or some other similar cause for what happened. People are not as greedy as many people think.  They want to believe in their medical people