In any profession, including medicine, there are rules propounded by varying organizations. Some are local, some are national and some are international. They don’t carry the same weight everywhere. It is important for your lawyer to have access to credible and careful professionals to discern the difference between rules that don’t apply to any given […]
Turns out, politics isn’t the only place where misinformation is used to ply the soil that grows bad ideas. In the 1980’s, health care providers and insurance carriers deliberately and falsely yelled that the sky was falling due to negligence claims and payouts. Their solution? Caps on damages in the most righteous and significant cases. […]
More than four years ago, Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught typed two letters into a hospital’s computerized medication cabinet, selected the wrong drug from the search results, and gave a patient a fatal dose. The new Kaiser report on medication errors is here. In 2017, I posted a three-part series about my experience litigating a deadly […]
The link to the story from Palm Beach County is here: Patients express concern over Tenet Health’s potential malpractice Rather than trying to sum it up, allow me to let the story speak for itself. It is one more example of how patients are treated as simple objects or vehicles for the health system to […]
A North Carolina appellate court recently ruled that civil litigants need counsel physically present when they are deposed. This wholesale ban on personal attendance of Defendant’s counsel at depositions of its own employees and witnesses presented the constitutional issue Defendant asserts in this appeal and was not supported by existing law, emergency orders, or evidence. […]
The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient’s breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered. That was in a prestigious Tennessee hospital. The link is here. I had […]
In the late 1980s, the Florida legislature set up a regulatory scheme to immunize doctors and hospitals by locking Florida courthouse doors to the families of some children who suffer severe brain damage during birth. All government programs get an acronym and the acronym for this burden-shifting agency is NICA (The Florida Birth-Related Neurological Injury […]
During a hospital stay, there are many ways for things to go sideways. For a timely and successful discharge, every health care provider and every department has to be working as one – each fulfilling their part toward the end goal of stabilizing the patient and putting them on the road to recovery. The nursing […]
Cancer patients are caught in the middle of a fight between the Annapolis hospital and nine oncologists. While hospital representatives say the nine doctors resigned, they argue they wanted to continue practicing there and were fired. The doctors were denied access to practice at the hospital and filed a lawsuit in response. Business disputes in […]
The House vote gave some hope that this was the year that Florida would recognize the inequities in the Wrongful Death Act that discriminate against victims of medical malpractice. But the special interests appear to have won out yet again – at the expense of Florida families. Florida’s legislature passed the bill that immunized hospitals, […]
