Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice News

Kevin MD reports on the idea of drive-through emergency rooms. Stanford Hospital & Clinics has turned the first floor of a parking garage into a drive-through emergency room.

This sounds completely stupid and insane. And then you think about it a little more and it is not so crazy. The thinking is that this might not only be efficient and convenient but also a good way to treat way to treat a large number of patients during any communicable disease outbreak. The Swine Flu debacle apparently has doctors thinking of more creative ways to treat infectious diseases, and maybe a drive-thru ER would prove effective for some other conditions as well.

Two Texas nurses have been charged criminally with reporting a doctor to the Texas Medical Board.

I’ll bet you $10 the charges are dropped once the Winkler County District Attorney wakes up. (Is this an elected post?) But the chilling effect that will flow all the way to Maryland will be nurses taking the path of least resistance and allowing doctors to go unchallenged will be a legacy of this case.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has overturned both the trial court and an intermediate appeals court, reversing one of the largest medical malpractice suit verdicts in New Jersey, a whopping $75,967,140 (which the trial court had reduced to $70,891,781.59).

The facts of this case, regardless of whether medical malpractice was the cause, are far beyond awful. A four-month-old boy suffered brain damage when he was deprived of oxygen following surgery in 1998. There was no dispute that the boy suffers from significant intellectual, verbal, and neuron motor deficits and will require substantial, round-the-clock care for the rest of his life, barring some incredible new technology. The boy also sustained a hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which is a brain injury that results in cortical blindness.

In addition to what had to be incredible sympathy for the child (any human being would), the jury also had to be put off by the emergency room doctor’s defense. The doctor first argued that the injury occurred prior to her arrival in the PICU. But that claim was rebutted by reconstruction of the timeline that largely was undercut by the discovery of the cardiac monitoring strips that were produced by the defendants’ medical malpractice lawyers (not the ER’s doc’s malpractice lawyer) two weeks into the trial. Incredible, right?

I provided my thoughts on Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on Friday on Public Citizen’s recent report on medical malpractice and its impact on health care costs. The short answer: not much. But Public Citizen provided one more malpractice statistic that is worth mentioning. In an hour, chances are that five to 11 Americans will die from preventable medical errors by the time you finish. Statistically, it is more likely than not that not a single malpractice payment will be made because any of these deaths that would not have occurred absent medical malpractice.

The notion that most malpractice lawsuits in Maryland are trumped up by medical malpractice lawyers is just plain false. The reality is that, relatively speaking, few meritorious malpractice cases ever see the light of day.

Republican Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law a bill making it more difficult to bring medical malpractice lawsuits in the state. Republican supporters of the bill said it will help attract doctors to the state. Opponents argue that the measure threatens the ability of malpractice victims to recover damages for medical negligence.

What this means is that if a jury concludes that you walked into an emergency room and become paralyzed or die as the result of careless emergency room doctor or nurse, the jury may still find the doctor not responsible under Arizona malpractice law. It is just a bad idea that turns hundreds of years of medical malpractice law on its head.

The Arizona Star reports that the Arizona legislature is considering a law that would – to put it lightly – make it more difficult for medical malpractice lawyers to recover compensation in medical malpractice cases for their clients. Under the proposed bill, the plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases would be required to prove by “clear and convincing evidence’ that doctor failed to meet the standard of care. A similar bill passed the Arizona legislature in 2006 but was vetoed by former governor Janet Napolitano.

Under this law, juries can reason that while they think the doctor committed medical malpractice, they cannot be “clear and convincing” sure. I would be a bad law that turns the notion of civil justice that we have had in the country from the beginning on its head.

Point of Law suggests that medical malpractice lawyers and their lobbyists are behind the often cited Institute of Medicine’s report that medical malpractice kills 100,000 people a year.

Who knows? How do you argue the methodology without digging through the methodology? I just don’t know. But it is important to point out that the Institute of Medicine was a government agency without a real horse in the race.

I realize that one of the investigators thinks the data was misused and there is talk that drug abuse victims were counted as malpractice deaths. But, really, what if the number is 50,000? That’s almost 3 a day for every state in the United States. Think about that for a second. It is still way too many.

A Beaumont, Texas man has filed a medical malpractice suit against a local doctor, alleging a needle negligently left inside his body during surgery perforated his bladder. According to the suit filed in Jefferson County District Court, the doctor – a long time general surgeon in Beaumont – failed to locate and retrieve the needle before closing up Plaintiff after surgery.

Maryland malpractice law is tough on many of these “left something behind in the patient” claims because of the five-year statute of repose. This malpractice statute of limitations does not excuse cases filed after five years of the injury, even if the plaintiff never knew of the injury. Some disagree with this interpretation by arguing that an “injury” does not occur until the patient knows of the injury, but I don’t know whether this is a viable end-run around that statute that the Maryland appellate courts will sign off on under the current state of his malpractice law (we have never pursed a case outside of the five-year limit). The application of this statute will vary from case to case – fraud is certainly an exception to the harshness of this statute – but this statute can cause some very harsh outcomes.