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 [...]
Hospital infections remain one of the dark secrets of American hospitals. Rather than becoming rarer, hospital infections seem to be more common. The bacteria Clostridium difficile, also called C. diff., has added to this developing danger in the last several years. USA Today reported that about 350,000 C. diff infections resulted in about 30,000 deaths nationwide in 2010. C [...]
I came across this pretty astounding surgical error: a Toledo area nurse tossed out a healthy kidney during a transplant surgery. This kind of error, seemingly unbelievable, raises a number of interesting considerations. The article proclaims that such an error is rare. I take issue with that. Surgical errors are all too common. I [...]
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 [...]
The New York Times reported yesterday about a 12 year-old who died from infection after abnormal test results were ignored in a New York City hospital. The boy had a known and treatable infection that progressed over a few days to sepsis and shock. Had the boy's test results been heeded, antibiotics would have undoubtedly saved his life. [...]
One common type of surgical error occurs before the operation is even scheduled. Like the Abraham Maslow saying "if you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail," surgeons are sometimes criticized for over-prescribing surgical fixes to medical problems. Poor patient selection may rise to the level of medical negligence if (a) the patient isn't [...]
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 [...]
There are two types of surgical errors: avoidable ones and "known and accepted complications of the procedure." Avoidable errors occur when surgeons fail to take proper precautions during a surgery, perform wrong-site surgery or perform a surgery that is not indicated thereby putting the patient at unnecessary risk. When an avoidable surgical error occurs and harm ensues, there is likely [...]
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 [...]