Hospital negligence comes in various shapes and sizes. A clear case of medical negligence occurs when a doctor orders a test but the test is never performed or the results go unread, and the patient dies or is injured as a result of the missed test result. The Archives of Internal Medicine recently published an article showing that physicians [...]
Hospital infections were included by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) in its list of "never events." Never events are preventable complications that arise in a hospital setting. When they occur, CMS has taken the hard-line stance that it will not reimburse hospitals for costs associated with such an event. A recent article by the American [...]
Speak up and stay alive is all about your healthcare and the need for you to be an active participant in your healthcare. I recently met Pat Rullo, an author, speaker and trainer on health care issues and surviving hospital care. Her story is not unique. What is unique about her is that she is [...]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published an alert last month related to hospital negligence: multiple reports of tubing misconnections leading to death or serious injury. These tubing misconnections arise in a number of contexts: a feeding luer (a tapered connector) erroneously connected to a tracheostomy tube; an epidural catheter mistakenly connected to an IV line; IV [...]
One of the primary functions of a hospital is to provide adequate nursing staffing to monitor and treat patients. Both for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals have long attempted to cut costs by understaffing and, thereby overworking, their nursing staff. This cost-cutting (and corner-cutting) practice often has dire consequences for patients. A recent study points out one less-than-obvious consequence [...]
Ask a medical malpractice lawyer and he or she will tell you, without hesitation, that more hospital negligence occurs on weekends and holidays than during week days. Now trial lawyers' anecdotal evidence of the hazards associated with weekend and holiday admissions is backed up by recently published medical articles. In 2001, the New England Journal of Medicine published an [...]
In Ohio, hospital negligence remains a common source of medical malpractice claims. AARP's Bulletin recently published an article about the dangers of hospital admissions, entitled "Hospitals May Be the Worst Place to Stay When You're Sick." The article notes that little has changed since the Institute of Medicine published "To Err is Human" in 1999, which [...]