Health law plays a crucial role in the field of medicine, as it dictates appropriate practices, regulations, and rights and responsibilities for healthcare professionals and patients. Despite this undeniable relationship, there is a lack of focus on health law, and an outdated hidden curriculum in medical education has perpetuated long-standing negative perceptions of the legal system.

The link to the peer reviewed article is found just below:

Medical Law and Medical School Curricula: A Systematic Review

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Shortages of critical medications continue to rise—including drugs used in hospital emergency rooms and to treat cancer, prescription medications, and even common over-the-counter treatments like children’s cold and flu medicine. The number of active drug shortages in the U.S. reached a peak of 295 at the end of 2022. However, drug shortages are not a new problem. They are caused by a number of factors, including economic drivers, insufficient supply chain visibility, and a continued U.S. overreliance on both foreign and geographically concentrated sources for medications and their raw materials. These shortages have cascading effects on patient care, causing delays in treatment, increasing the risk of medication errors, and requiring the use of less effective alternative treatments. Hospitals have also experienced increased costs, medication waste, and limited staffing capacity to address and remedy shortages.

Here is the link:

SHORT SUPPLY The Health and National Security Risks of Drug Shortages

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The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 raised the alarm while calling for urgent action to reduce patient harm in healthcare. The United Nations (UN) specialized agency stated that medical malpractice results in 2.6 million deaths annually.

“Most of these deaths are avoidable. The personal, social and economic impact of patient harm leads to losses of trillions of US dollars worldwide,” the body said in its statement.

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 U.S., a position only behind heart disease and cancer, respectively.

Back in 2016, I posted about the Institute of Medicine numbers already accumulated on this continuing problem. Here’s the link:

Metrics For A New ‘Patient-Centric’ Safety Movement

Here is the link to the more recent story about the WHO study release: https://www.digitaljournal.com/life/is-medical-malpractice-becoming-a-trend/article#ixzz7tCwxBoNY

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We’ll be discussing the role of Behavioral Emergency Response Teams (BERTs), trained in non-violent intervention techniques, in managing disruptive behavior and improving safety for both patients and staff. We’ll also dive into the impact of trauma-informed care (TIC) on patient well-being and discuss strategies for implementing TIC in health care settings.

Strategies for Managing Disruptive Behaviors in Health Care Settings

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Originally reported in the New York Times, this study is getting wide attention.

“The study, released [Dec. 15] by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, estimates roughly 7.4 million people are inaccurately diagnosed of the 130 million annual visits to hospital emergency departments in the United States. Some 370,000 patients may suffer serious harm as a result. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, under a contract with the agency, analyzed data from two decades’ worth of studies to quantify the rate of diagnostic errors in the emergency room and identify serious conditions where doctors are most likely to make a mistake. Many of the studies were based on incidents in European countries and Canada, leading some officials of U.S. medical organizations to criticize the researchers’ conclusions.

While these errors remain relatively rare, they are most likely to occur when someone presents with symptoms that are not typical, like stroke patients complaining the room is spinning. A doctor may not immediately think that a young woman with shortness of breath is having a heart attack or that someone who has back pain could have a spinal abscess. ‘This is the elephant in the room no one is paying attention to,’ said Dr. David E. Newman-Toker, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence, and one of the study’s authors.”

Here is a link to the story in JD Supra:

Misdiagnoses lead to 250,000 ER patients’ deaths annually, U.S. study finds

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Our latest surveys of pharmacists, patients and providers to inform the upcoming 2023 Medication Access Report, support this. The surveys found that patients and care teams need faster medication access, greater affordability options and improved visibility at three critical junctions: the provider office, pharmacy counter and via tools patients can access directly.

Here’s the story in the journal Medical Economics

The 3 critical places where patients need support with their medications

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The nonprofit-governance requirement for medical schools was a core component of U.S. medical care’s transformation. But recently, several for-profit schools have been provisionally or fully accredited.

Here is the link to the New England Journal of Medicine article:

For-Profit Medical Schools — Concerns about Quality and Oversight

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Study: I-PASS Handoff Program Helps Reduce Patient Harm

And here’s a link to a video, links to published opinions, and a description of my experience litigating and trying handoff miscommunication and other incidents of medical malpractice.

My Medical Malpractice Experience Page

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Across the country, children have for weeks been slammed with a massive, early wave of viral infections—driven largely by RSV, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. Many emergency departments and intensive-care units are now at or past capacity, and resorting to extreme measures. At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, in Maryland, staff has pitched a tent outside the emergency department to accommodate overflow; Connecticut Children’s Hospital mulled calling in the National Guard. It’s already the largest surge of infectious illnesses that some pediatricians have seen in their decades-long careers, and many worry that the worst is yet to come. “It is a crisis,” Sapna Kudchadkar, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist and anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. “It’s bananas; it’s been full to the gills since September,” says Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health. “Every night I turn away a patient, or tell the emergency department they have to have a PICU-level kid there for the foreseeable future.”

Here’s a link to the article in The Atlantic

The Worst Pediatric-Care Crisis in Decades

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Ten years ago, 12-year-old Rory Staunton dove for a ball in gym class and scraped his arm. He woke up the next day with a 104-degree Fahrenheit fever, so his parents took him to the pediatrician and eventually the emergency room. It was just the stomach flu, they were told. Three days later, Rory died of sepsis after bacteria from the scrape infiltrated his blood and triggered organ failure.

“How does that happen in a modern society?” his father, Ciaran Staunton, asked me.

So begins The Atlantic’s story about a common instance of malpractice. It is not easy to admit that America is so poor in healthcare delivery. According to most metrics, we lag well behind other advanced countries and that gap widened considerably during the Coronavirus pandemic. See, for example,  The Peterson-KFF Health Tracker Survey, How does the quality of the U.S. health system compare to other countries?

If market forces applied, we’d be paying less for shoddy care. But they do not. The result is something I write about on this blog frequently – Quality Fraud. We over pay for marginal return in quality. Worse, too many have no ability to pay and are uninsured. That is a problem we are trying to come to grips with, at least.

Infections – and very serious ones – are more and more commonplace. In Florida, flesh-eating bacteria spread through the ocean and gulf waters. The foods we eat are often tainted with salmonella and other dangerous microbes.

We ought to be able to get a handle on this and yet, over the decades, I’ve watched our healthcare management deteriorate.

Here is a link to the article in The Atlantic.

Doctors Still Struggle to Diagnose a Condition That Kills More Americans Than Stroke

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