Medical Negligence And Pharmaceutical Injury

Although the field of medicine is not perfect, doctors and medical staff must be accountable for their actions. Injuries suffered as a result of medical negligence are very serious because patients already have a medical condition prior to seeing treatment. Negligent or reckless behavior on behalf of the doctors or other staff can have fatal repercussions.

Medical negligence can occur for a number of reasons at any stage of the medical process. It can result from an action taken by a medical practitioner, or by the failure to take a medically necessary action. Examples of medical negligence include:

• Misdiagnosis: A problem must be correctly diagnosed in order to treat. If the information regarding a diagnosis is incorrect, a patient and doctor cannot select the right treatment, and the recovery process cannot begin.

• Emergency Room Errors: Because patients come into the ER with severe problems, there is a very little room for medical errors. This makes emergency room errors one of the most severe, often resulting in death if a mistake is made. The overcrowding in the ER also makes is easier for clerical errors to occur, which can cause a number of disastrous problems.

• Improper Treatment: Treatment may be the most significant part of the process. The road to recovery begins by addressing a patient’s ailments. Improper treatment can allow the medical condition to worsen or cause complications that can result in severe harm.

• Lack of Informed Consent: Informed consent means that your doctor must describe your medical condition, the treatment, and any possible side effects in full detail. Signing your name or agreeing to a procedure does not always mean you have given informed consent. If you have agreed to a procedure without being made fully aware of the consequences, the doctor may be held accountable.

• Surgical Errors: Each surgery is complex, and there are countless ways to make a mistake during an involved procedure. Sometimes surgeons will mistakenly operate on the wrong patient, perform the incorrect procedure or operate on the wrong site. Other surgical errors include improper suturing, leaving foreign objects in the body, mishandling surgical instruments and making anesthesia errors.

• Hospital Negligence: From record-keeping errors to a lack of staff communication, there are countless mistakes that can be made by any hospital employee.

All of these mistakes are preventable; therefore it is imperative that the appropriate party is held responsible for their actions.

Pharmaceutical Injury

Prescription drugs can work wonders to improve and save lives. But unfortunately, patients who have relied on certain medications have suffered serious harm.

The competitive and profitable pharmaceutical industry can pose a serious risk to consumers. Because drug manufacturing companies market their pharmaceuticals so aggressively, they tend to ignore or downplay potential health risks. This means that by the time negative side effects are discovered and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalls the drug, tons of people have already been exposed to the dangers.

Common Pharmaceutical Injuries

While side effects will vary depending on the type of drug, common pharmaceutical injuries include:

• Heart attack
• Stroke
• Diabetes
• Suicide
• Kidney damage
• Liver damage and/or failure

The law cannot reverse the damage caused by a pharmaceutical injury. However, by collecting compensation, victims and their families do not have to worry about medical bills and other costs. Compensation also holds guilty parties accountable for their actions.

Article Source : The Cochran Firm – Medical Negligence And Pharmaceutical Injury : ArticleBase

Erich Shrefler
If you or a loved one has been a victim of medical negligence, please visit the website for The Cochran Firm, serving clients nationwide.

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New York Wrong-Site Surgery: Preventable Harm

Surgery is stressful enough without having to worry whether the surgeon is going to operate on the correct body part. A wrong-site surgery occurs when the doctor mistakenly performs a medical procedure on the incorrect organ or wrong side of the body.

Although some of these sorts of medical mistakes may be corrected after the fact, they are often irreversible, such as with an amputation or removal of an internal organ.

Recent New England Example

The Rhode Island Department of Health on November 2 publicly reprimanded Providence’s Rhode Island Hospital, affiliated with Brown University, for an October surgery on a patient’s wrong finger. The Health Department found that the hospital did not follow its own safety procedures governing proper surgical-site marking and planned timeout from the surgical process to check that nothing was amiss.

For only the second time ever, the Rhode Island Department of Health imposed a fine on a hospital ($150,000). The first was on the same institution in 2007 for another wrong-site surgery. In addition to the current incident, this hospital has had four other wrong-site surgeries since 2006: three brain surgeries and one for cleft palate.

In addition to the fine, regulators required the hospital to install video and audio equipment in operating rooms and mandated observation for a year of each surgical procedure by a medical professional with special training in safe surgery and implementation of a statewide surgical safety protocol that was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Hospital President and Chief Executive Officer Timothy Babineau, M.D., acknowledges the most recent incident on the hospital’s Web site, pledging ongoing safety improvement. He estimates that “wrong site surgical errors continue to occur at hospitals all over this country at a rate of nearly 40 per week.”

Root Causes and Prevention

Researchers have found wrong-site surgeries to be symptomatic of both poor communication among involved medical professionals, the patient and family and of inadequate teamwork among the doctors, nurses and other medical professionals on the surgical team. Other contributing factors include fatigue, stress, complexity of our healthcare system, inadequate institutional information management systems, hurriedness and inexperience.

WHO developed an international pilot program that introduced a Surgical Patient Safety Checklist and found that when followed, use of the protocol resulted in nearly one third significantly fewer deaths and complications among a diverse adult patient population undergoing non-cardiac surgery. The pilot program researchers, who are part of the WHO Safe Surgery Saves Lives Study Group, published their findings in the January 14, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Essentially, the WHO protocol has evolved into a 19-item checklist that contains a series of points during all surgical procedures that a surgical team goes through and when doing so, the team must confirm they had completed each step in the protocol. For example, the study identified three critical points during a surgical procedure: before anesthesia, just before incision, and before the patient leaves the operating room.� A significant requirement of this protocol is that a member of the team must verbally confirm that each step of infection control, anesthesia safety and other important considerations�are met, such as confirming the correct surgical site is marked at the start and at the time the surgery begins, or the right number of sponges and instruments are on the table and of course, at the end of the procedure.�

In addition to WHO, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO or Joint Commission), the biggest and oldest U.S. professional organization setting healthcare safety standards and accrediting medical facilities, has developed, with input from major medical associations, professionals and the public, the Universal Protocol for Preventing Wrong Site, Wrong Procedure and Wrong Person Surgery (Universal Protocol). Widely endorsed, the protocol has three main parts:

• Presurgury verification of documents
• Clear and unambiguous surgical-site marking
• Timeout immediately before surgery

The timeout is used to confirm the right surgical procedure, surgical site and patient identity. All members of the surgical team are urged to verbalize during the timeout questions or confusion about the surgery the team is about to perform.

The jury is still out as to the long-term effectiveness of the Universal Protocol in preventing surgical-site errors. Its use is required in JCAHO-accredited facilities and its basic elements have been adopted and enhanced by many state governments, professional organizations and medical institutions in developing their own protocols.

New York Surgical Errors

The problem of wrong-site surgery is also alive and well in New York. For example, from 2003 to 2005, 347 wrong-site, wrong-patient or wrong-procedure events were reported through the New York Patient Occurrence and Tracking System (NYPORTS), the mandatory state medical-error reporting system.

After reviewing the Universal Protocol and other resources, New York developed its own New York State Surgical and Invasive Procedure Protocol (NYSSIPP). NYSSIPP is the official and required standard of care for most surgical procedures in New York. It includes and enhances the three basic elements of the Universal Protocol — verification, marking and timeout — plus standards for scheduling, consent, disagreement resolution and compliance oversight. NYSSIPP especially encourages active communication among all members of the surgical team, particularly during the scheduled preoperative timeout.

New York Medical Malpractice

A New York patient who is the unfortunate victim of wrong-site surgery should consult with an experienced medical malpractice attorney to discuss possible legal remedies. In order to be successful on a claim for medical malpractice in New York, a plaintiff must prove that the doctor or other medical professional departed from an accepted standard of practice, and that the deviation proximately caused the complained-of injury. Other possible legal claims could be general negligence, gross negligence, wrongful death, lack of consent or reckless indifference. In a New York wrong-site surgery case, a likely issue will be whether the surgeon and his or her team complied with the requirements of the Universal Protocol and the NYSSIPP, and whether deviation from the standards in those protocols caused injury.

A personal injury lawyer should be contacted as early as possible so as not to miss any deadlines for giving notice or bringing a lawsuit.

Article Source : New York Wrong-Site Surgery: Preventable Harm : ArticleBase

Marc J. Chase
Weinstein, Chase, Messinger & Peters, P.C., is one of the oldest continuous law firms in Brooklyn, NY. The firm originated in 1955 as Weinstein & Chayt, P. C., with an office in Brooklyn, New York. Since 1958, the principal office has been located at 26 Court Street, Brooklyn, New York. In 1992, the firm name became Weinstein, Chayt & Chase P.C., with the addition of attorney Marc J. Chase. It merged with the law firm of Jeffrey Peters, P.C., in 2004, and in the following year, further expanded with the addition of Jules G. Messinger to take on its current name.

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