Hospital Negligence

Dosing with spoons will lead to under- or overmedication

Published on: July 17, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

At some point in our lives, most of us have been given a prescription for a liquid medicine. Liquid medicines, though generally as effective as pill-based medicine, do have one major drawback, it is up to the patient or his or her caretaker to measure out and administer the medicine. Unfortunately, this means that many people are being under- or overmedicated. Sometimes these medication errors can lead to serious injuries or even death.

One way in which patients can be improperly dosed is if a patient or caretaker uses a spoon to measure medicine. And if neither the prescribing physician or the pharmacist explains that it is important to measure out medicine in milliliters, some patients may not realize they aren’t taking the proper amount of medicine.

It would also be relatively easy to eliminate the risk of medication error if doctors and pharmacists would just prescribe a certain number of milliliters instead of in teaspoons. If the directions say to “take 5 milliliters” of medicine, patients would need a measuring container that lists various volumes. If the directions are listed in teaspoons, a patient may wrongly assume a kitchen spoon will be fine.

Using medical malpractice lawsuits to prompt change

Published on: July 3, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Most fields are always changing, and medicine is no different. What is changing within medicine, however, is not necessarily techniques and skills that will reduce serious medical errors or fatal hospital negligence. Instead, it is often finding new medicines or new ways of performing procedures. Yet many of the problems of medical malpractice remain.

So, what could get the medical community to change? There are some people who believe that hospitals, physicians and other medical professionals would be more likely to delve into safety issues if they were subject to more high-publicity, costly malpractice lawsuits. There is even historical evidence that backs this presumption up.

In the early 1980s, anesthesiologists were getting slammed by a series of medical malpractice lawsuits. Time and time again they were found liable for serious medical errors, so the American Society of Anesthesiologists looked into what had been harming patients. After making some changes to working hours and monitoring, updated machines, and created safety devices, anesthesiologists have seen a tremendous increase in safety.

Fungus believed to cause numerous deaths transported by linens

Published on: May 8, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Even though people realize that hospitals are filled with numerous infectious diseases, not many people in Oneida think too much about hospital-acquired infections. The problem is, however, that approximately 75,000 people die each year because of infections they caught in hospitals, at least according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This also means that there are far more people who get sick, need to extend their hospital stays or otherwise suffer damages yet survive hospital-acquired infections.

It is just as much a hospital’s responsibility to prevent contamination and infections as it is a surgeon’s responsibility to perform procedures according to standard medical practice or a nurse’s responsibility to administer the correct dosages of medicine. Hospital malpractice may not seem like a serious threat, but it certainly can be.

Unfortunately, in a recently covered outbreak out of New Orleans, five young patients died after they were infected by mucormycosis, a fungus. It appears that the fungus was in the hospital linens on which the children slept, which has prompted an investigation into how a hospital could use unclean linens.

New York man discovers malpractice when appendix wasn’t removed

Published on: April 19, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

It is not that uncommon to suffer appendicitis, or the inflammation of the appendix. People in New York are diagnosed with the condition quite frequently, generally after they go to the hospital with intense pain and swelling in the abdomen. The only treatment is to have the appendix removed or risk it bursting, leaking pus and infection into the abdominal cavity. If the appendix is left in, a patient could die from peritonitis.

So, when a Bronxville, New York, man had to get an emergency appendctomy while on vacation, he may have been a bit surprised, as he was supposed to have had his appendix removed in January 2013 in New York. It seems, however, that the surgeon failed to remove the appendix, just a yellowish mass, and now the man is suing both the hospital and the surgeon for medical negligence.

You see, this was not just the surgeon’s fault (although he is certainly not off the hook). The man’s appendix, or whatever the surgeon removed, was sent to pathology following its extraction. The hospital knew that the man’s appendix was still in him, but it never told him, nor did it tell him that a yellowish mass had been removed from his body.

Learning from years of mistakes

Published on: April 10, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of hospital-acquired infections is down. Though there may be other explanations as to why the rate of hospital infections has fallen since 2002, it would appear that hospitals are trying to avoid some of the problems of years past. Hospitals should certainly be commended for reducing their rate of illness, but there were still an estimated 722,000 hospital infections in 2011 alone.

Hospital negligence is often a cause of hospital-acquired infections. In some cases, hospitals fail to properly sanitize rooms for new patients, they allow doctors and nurses to wear clothing that has a high risk of transferring germs, or rules regarding hand washing are not thoroughly enforced. When it is clear that a hospital is to blame for a patient’s illness, it is often the hospital that becomes the subject of a medical malpractice lawsuit.

While the drop in the rate of hospital infections is commendable, there is also concern that the rate was compiled from hospital data alone, despite the fact that more than half of patients undergoing an operation have it done at an outpatient surgical center. In addition, much of the transitional and recovery care is done at nursing homes. Without including infection statistics at these types of facilities, the CDC’s approximate rate of infection may not accurately reflect the current state of medicine.