Two nursing school operators in the Fort Lauderdale area have fessed up to peddling fake diplomas to thousands of students who could then avoid completing a rigorous program before taking licensing exams in what prosecutors say was a multimillion-dollar racket stretching from South Florida to New York.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article274207135.html#storylink=cpy

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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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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.

Read more: https://www.digitaljournal.com/life/is-medical-malpractice-becoming-a-trend/article#ixzz7svSKm14Z

The post Medical Malpractice Can Be Fatal appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

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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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 the manifest need for speed. Delays in surgery, tests, drugs, orders, delivery of a child, or a simple taking of vital signs. Catastrophic adverse events can happen slowly … then suddenly. Often, they appear in the blink of an eye but on closer inspection were blinking their warnings much earlier.

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From today’s New York Times report on the large hospital system Ascension,

Both (Chicago) hospitals are owned by one of the country’s largest health systems, Ascension. It spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.

Since the start of the pandemic, nurses have been leaving hospitals in droves. The exodus stems from many factors, with the hospital industry blaming Covid, staff burnout and tight labor markets for acute shortages of staff.

Hospital staffing shortages create gaps and drops in healthcare delivery that I discuss on this blog pretty regularly. As an example, here is a post from September of this year.

Don’t Get Sick

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Yahoo News provides an important reminder.

American Founders Knew: Right to Counsel Is Fundamental

The right to counsel is a core American principle pre-dating the establishment of American jurisprudence. Our founding fathers experienced the tyranny of a king whose decisions couldn’t be questioned and a justice system that employed the death penalty to eliminate his political opponents. To avoid such abuses of power, they established the right to a defense lawyer in the 1660s as one of the first checks on governmental power. This long standing right is essential to making sure everyone gets a fair trial.

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High LDL-C is inversely associated with mortality in most people over 60 years. This finding is inconsistent with the cholesterol hypothesis.

You can find the BMJ study here:

Lack of an association or an inverse association between low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review

While guidance for prescribing statins remains unchanged, more and more questions are being asked. The influence of Big Pharma on these decisions cannot be understated. Statin use is now so prevalent that a cottage industry has built up around studying their side effects. Dr. David Healy is a conscientious and responsible professional to follow if you are interested in the effects of Big Pharma on the FDA. Here is one of his excellent articles on the subject of randomized controlled trials and how they are run.

The Evidence that Counts for FDA

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It is not permissible for MAs to perform tasks that constitute the practice of medicine or require the skill and knowledge of physicians or other licensed providers. Balasa noted physicians or administrators may believe if a physician thinks the MA is competent at a task, then the task may be delegated, but that is not correct legally. If the task requires the skill and knowledge of a licensed provider, it cannot be delegated to an MA.

Here’s the link to the story in Medical Economics.

MGMA 2022: What duties can medical assistants take on? Some principles for delegating

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