Dispensing errors occur when a pharmacy commits a medication error and patients receive a different drug, a different dosage or a different drug quantity than their doctor prescribed. Sometimes when the doctor prescribed several medications, the pharmacy might also miss one. While most patients realize when the pharmacy did not…
In a 2nd Department decision decided June 24, 2020, (see decision here), the Court reversed a trial court’s reduction of a $2.5 million jury verdict in a medical malpractice action involving a perforated intestine during an upper endoscopy. When conservative treatment failed, Mrs. Garzon required an exploratory laparotomy to resect…
700 women die from medical complications related to child birth on average every year in the US. 60% of these fatalities are preventable. Maternal health was ranked the number two patient safety concern in the Top 10 Patient Safety Concern 2020 recently released by the ECRI Institute. The CDC recently…
Missed and delayed diagnoses are common medical errors that can lead to serious injury and death. This morning the Daily Mail wrote about an 11 year old boy who died from severe bowel obstruction after a doctor misdiagnosed him with constipation and sent him back home. The doctor neglected to…
This week, both Northwell Health of New York and Massachusetts General Hospital agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle medical malpractice cases related to concurrent surgery. Double-booked surgery also called simultaneous surgery or concurrent surgery is a recently new practice implemented by hospitals all over the country during which…
To boost transplant patient survival rates, Dr Mark Zucker and his team have allegedly been keeping vegetative patients on life support for an entire year without family consent according to a recent investigation by ProPublica. For hospitals that have organ transplant programs, the patient survival rate is the most important…
Since 2001 more than 150,000 patients in the US have been notified by their healthcare providers that they might have been potentially exposed to bloodborne pathogens such as hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after a health provider committed medical malpractice by failing…
The Center for Justice and Democracy recently released the 2019 edition of their Medical Malpractice Briefing Book. This very popular publication was updated with the most recent studies, statistics and general healthcare information and comes with links to the original material. In addition to the usual sections, this new edition…
As medicine evolves so do the risks for medical malpractice. Here are the top main risks according to the 2019 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns recently published by the ECRI Institute: Improper use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) can be medical malpractice that can cause severe harm and sometimes…
Army medical staff and doctors should be accountable for medical malpractice says a bipartisan group of House lawmakers that just announced a legislation that would allow malpractice lawsuits against the military by creating an exemption to the Feres Doctrine, a 69-year-old legal precedent barring that legal action. This new legislation…
