One health system delivers most of Rochester’s babies
Rochester’s obstetric care runs largely through two systems — and its highest-risk deliveries through one building. Strong Memorial Hospital, the University of Rochester Medical Center’s flagship, houses Golisano Children’s Hospital and the region’s highest-level neonatal intensive care unit, serving as the regional perinatal center for the Finger Lakes. Complicated pregnancies from a seventeen-county region are referred there, and critically ill newborns from community hospitals across the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier are transferred to its NICU. When a birth injury happens in this region, URMC’s records are involved more often than not, either because the delivery happened there, or because the aftermath did.
Rochester’s maternity hospitals
Most Rochester-area families deliver at one of four hospitals: Strong Memorial and Highland Hospital (both URMC, with Highland running one of the area’s largest maternity services) and, in the Rochester Regional Health system, Rochester General Hospital with its own NICU and Unity Hospital in Greece. The choice of hospital rarely matters to a healthy delivery; it matters enormously afterward, because it determines whose obstetric protocols apply, where the fetal monitoring strips live, and which NICU documented the critical first hours. Families from Batavia, Geneva, Canandaigua, and the smaller Finger Lakes hospitals frequently end up with records in two systems (the delivering hospital’s and Strong’s), and both sets matter.
The injuries behind Finger Lakes claims
The cases we hear from Monroe County and the surrounding Finger Lakes follow the statewide pattern: hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) where fetal distress went unaddressed or cooling therapy started late, oxygen deprivation from delayed cesareans or mismanaged labor, and cerebral palsy diagnoses that arrive at age two and send parents back to the delivery records with new questions. It needs saying plainly: not every birth injury is malpractice. Referral centers like Strong take the region’s hardest cases, and a bad outcome after a genuinely unforeseeable emergency is a tragedy, not a lawsuit. The records review exists to tell the two apart.
How a Rochester case works
Rochester birth injury suits are filed in the Monroe County Supreme Court at the Hall of Justice downtown, in New York’s Seventh Judicial District. New York’s statewide rules apply: 2 years and 6 months for malpractice claims, a child’s claim paused during infancy but never beyond 10 years, parents’ claims not paused, a physician-backed certificate of merit before filing, and no damages caps of any kind, which matters most in cases requiring a lifetime care plan. The complete framework is on our New York birth injury lawyer page.
Delivered at Strong, Highland, Rochester General, or Unity? Our attorneys, licensed in New York, will request and review the complete delivery records at no cost, and give you a straight answer about whether the standard of care was met.
Why the records request comes first
In a region where care concentrates in large systems, the complete chart (prenatal visits, the labor timeline, monitoring strips, NICU flow sheets, transport logs for babies transferred in) is both easier to obtain and more decisive than anywhere else. Electronic records also carry timestamps and audit trails that reconstruct the night of a delivery minute by minute: when the tracing turned abnormal, when the physician was called, when the operating room was ready. Those timelines, rather than memories, are what these cases are decided on.
Banville Law is a New York firm; Laurence P. Banville, Esq. has been licensed in New York since 2009, and Rochester cases are handled on contingency. The review is free, the physician consultation New York’s certificate-of-merit rule requires comes at our expense, and fees are owed only if your family recovers, with no cap in New York on what a proven case can recover.
This page is for general education and is not legal advice. Hospital names identify where care occurs and do not imply negligence by any institution in any particular case. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.