Preventable harm caused by health care providers to patients is the core mission addressed in a medical malpractice case. The need is greater now than ever. Due to the growing rate of medical errors and malpractice, scientists at Johns Hopkins in 2016 proposed it should rank as the third leading cause of death in the […]
An appellate court reversed a punitive damage claim brought against a Hospital only. Where culpable or wanton (criminal) recklessness is alleged, the line between professional employment and misconduct outside the scope of that employment is always at play. Trial lawyers juggle that difficult balance in the most serious cases. Fourth DCA Reverses Punitive Damages Against […]
Though the hospital denies that Dalo woke up during his surgery, the man’s case is emboldened by his wife’s discovery that soon after the procedure, the supervising anesthesiologist had his license suspended. What’s more, the anesthesiologist had apparently been found unconscious on the floor of a bathroom in the hospital with vomit on his scrubs […]
There was a New England Journal of Medicine article decades ago that found that if emergency room patients didn’t list their complaints in the right order and in time – they wouldn’t be heard or recorded properly. Originally reported in the New York Times, this study is getting wide attention. “The study, released [Dec. 15] by […]
Said the wait child, bruised ball child, pride slapped child hurts The wait child, crest felled child, tear eyed child hurts The wait child, bus stop child, late come child hurts The wait child, platform walk, idle talk hurts Pretenders, The Wait So many of my cases have involved a delay in the face of […]
In my line of work, these kinds of cases often show up as patients who suffered adverse events because they “fell through the cracks” (an awful euphemism for getting substandard care). Our latest surveys of pharmacists, patients and providers to inform the upcoming 2023 Medication Access Report, support this. The surveys found that patients and […]
The end of the year brings legislative sessions to a close, setting up final face-offs between special interests affected by pending legislation. Back in the Spring, I wrote in separate posts about a long hoped-for consumer win in Florida to change unfair wrongful death laws: Turns out, politics isn’t the only place where misinformation is […]
These things don’t scream from the medical chart: “We’re having a staffing problem!” Nurses and doctors don’t write things like that in patient charts. Good trial lawyers know how to identify when staffing may be an issue. For instance, when emergency room nurses stop taking a patient’s vital signs for hours – that is a […]
A Texas medical malpractice case involving a man’s needless paralysis provides a useful example of the relationship between economic and non-economic damages. Attorneys argued the hospital violated numerous internal policies by needlessly delaying a critically needed MRI scan and emergency surgery. The jury found that the hospital was negligent and that the negligence caused the […]
Transparency and patient safety are a problem in health care around the globe – not just in the US. In 2018, the largest peer review in NHS and Northern Ireland’s history identified numerous concerns regarding a neurology practice, including lack of proper clinical investigation, inaccurate diagnoses, poor prescribing practices, poor recording keeping, lack of openness […]
