On our website, we have put up pages that provide information about bringing medical malpractice claims against hospitals in Maryland, including these four Baltimore City hospitals:
- Harbor Hospital
- Johns Hopkins
- University of Maryland
- Franklin Square (technically not in the City but right on the line)
In my line of work, it is easy to take potshots at hospitals. I’ve seen what I think were meritorious lawsuits against all four of these institutions. So, it is easy to put on your blinders and mock them as malpractice havens. The real work is a bit more complex. Clearly, two of these hospitals are nationally recognized hospitals.
I can tell you that if something bad happened to me, I would say rush me to Hopkins and if you can’t get there, get me to University. We are lucky to have both these hospitals. The other two? They are even easier to take shots at because they don’t have the halos that Hopkins and University. But I have no reason to believe you cannot get good medical care at Franklin Square or Harbor Hospital.
That said, all four of these hospitals have the same problem: rampant malpractice. You don’t kill 100,000 people a year in a country by malpractice and think it is limited just to bad institutions. There are both bad doctors and bad systems in every hospital in the country. Similarly, if you have a large law firm, I don’t care who you are, you will have some bad lawyers and/or some bad systems at that firm.
Besides a plug for these pages on our website, I’m not sure where this post is going. I always thought that providing information on the hospitals was a good idea, but I held off because it seems a little bit like naked trolling. And it is naked trolling on some level. But I think it provides information of interest to people considering malpractice claims against these hospitals.