Injury Law Report

Guarding against infections should be a primary goal of the hospital and its employees during your stay. But you can do a few things as well to decrease the possibility that you’ll bring something nasty and potentially serious germ home from the hospital.

A patient complains of shortness of breath after receiving routine kidney dialysis treatment. As a precaution, he was admitted to a local hospital. The next day, while alert and still basically OK, he complained of an upset stomach. His doctor prescribed an antacid. Instead, his nurse gives him a paralytic drug – pancuronium – that was inappropriately stored in the nursing area. This deadly screwup sends the patient into cardiac arrest. He was revived, but the lost of oxygen during the heart attack places him in a vegetative state. He dies a month later. An unusual occurrence, for sure, but preventable medical errors happen far too often and sometime have fatal consequences.
 

Surgeons operating on the wrong patient or the wrong part of your body? These careless medical problems are called “Never Events” because they are so shockingly avoidable that most doctors say they should “never” happen in the first place. Yet they do happen. Even though the medical profession has developed a “universal protocol” for doctors to follow prior to surgery and performing other key medical procedures, health professionals continue to cause injury and even death to patients in situations where such injury is entirely preventable. Listed below are examples of medical events identified by the National Quality Forum that should never occur and, if they do, require immediate investigation. The NQF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving American healthcare quality.

if you are considering bariatric surgery, and the doctor tells you that he or she can do it on you as an outpatient, think very hard about getting a 2nd opinion. Leading doctors in the weight loss surgery community, as well as a new outcomes study, suggest that weight loss treatment as an outpatient can be risky and have an adverse impact on your safety.

Patients have been injured by taking the wrong medication simply because, in some instances, the doctor or other health professional's handwriting could not be read. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices reports that some abbreviations are more likely to be misinterpreted, misunderstood or simply written incorrectly than others. For this reason, it recommends that some medication abbreviations never be used by health professionals. Here's a chart that provides a list of abbreviations that should not be used by doctors. Click here. 

Doctors and pharmacists often rely on the use of standard abbreviations in prescribing medication for their patients. But check out these most common abbreviation errors that can cause injury and death to unsuspecting patients:

Despite the health care industry's increasing reliance on technology, medication errors still causes significant injury --- and sometimes death --- to unsuspecting patients.

It’s the entire hospital’s responsibility…and particularly the operating room team handling surgeries routinely…to ensure that foreign objects are not left inside of patients after surgery. Yes, it does occur. It’s rare, but leaving a sponge inside a patient after an operation is one of those errors that simply should not happen. 

Doctors leaving sponges inside patients after surgery? Does this really happen? Yes, and unfortunately, is not as unusual as you think. Some studies suggest that about 1,500 people in U. S. medical facilities have objects accidentally left inside them after surgery. Others suggest it could be higher --- as many as 3000 to 5000 cases yearly. The most common object left behind? Sponges. Amounting to about 2/3 of the surgical objects left inside of patients, these sponges can lead to pain, infection, bowel obstructions, problems in healing, longer hospital stays, additional surgeries and, in rare cases, death.

Those of us who handle medical malpractice cases for injured people could have told you this without a costly study: Research conducted by a University of Missouri law professor found that juries are more likely to side with doctors in medical negligence cases. The study indicated that juries tend to be skeptical of persons who sue their doctors and that most malpractice trials end in defense verdicts. Data for the study were collected from cases in New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida and Michigan. Learn more here.

Surgical staff leave behind a sponge or scalpel in one in 10,000 operations. By leave behind, we mean that the sponge or scalpel is left in the patient after the surgery!!!

Can new technology help?

I know --- it sounds so horrible! Wrong site surgery! A doctor amputating the wrong leg??? But surgery on the wrong body part --- or the wrong patient --- happens. Yes, it is rare. But it occurs far too often in a country that prides itself in having the best medical system in the world. We are talking about a doctor who might amputate the healthy right leg of a patient instead of the diseased left leg, or remove the healthy spleen of the patient in operating room A instead of the diseased gall bladder, and then remove the healthy gall bladder of the patient in operating room B instead of the diseased spleen.