Ranked under heart disease and cancer, medical errors take more lives in the United States than other causes like car accidents, accidental shootings, falls, and poisonings. One researcher estimated some 251,000 deaths a year between the years of 2000-2008 could be attributed to medical errors, that’s a striking 700 deaths a day.
Medical errors are defined as preventable adverse of care, whether or not it is harmful to the patient. These can include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection or other ailment.
Medical errors or medical malpractice can occur in many different situations. The most notorious cases of course are the ones you hear about on the news. Situations like a doctor amputating the wrong body part, leaving a surgical device inside a patient’s body or a nurse dispensing the wrong medication to a patient occur more often than you think. But not all medical mistakes are glaringly obvious like those we hear about on TV.
Hospitals are busy, bustling hubs of activity. Doctors are going from patient to patient and room to room to see as many people as possible. Nurses are given orders for surgical prep, medications, and care. They see hundreds of patients a week. In this kind of environment, policies, procedures and safety measures must be put to practice, but oftentimes they are not and it is the patient who suffers.
CNN published a report a few years ago that outlines what they call the”10 Shocking Medical Errors”.
The first “Treating the Wrong Patient” occurs quite frequently. Hospital staff may confuse rooms, patient names and treatment. The solution is so simple it makes all of us scratch our heads and wonder why this occurs so frequently. If you’ve ever been a patient in a hospital, you know that the first thing they do is put an ID bracelet on you. Doctors and nurses are required to check that bracelet and ask you to identify yourself with your name and birth date whenever beginning a procedure or administering medication. Treating the wrong patient occurs when this simple safeguard is not put into practice.
The second “Surgical Souvenirs” is when a doctor or a supporting staff member miscounts or fails to count surgical tools, sponges, or other foreign objects after completing a surgery. The result, the patient goes home with a “souvenir” inside of their body! These foreign objects will cause pain, swelling, irritation and potentially deadly infection. If you experience pain, fever, and/or swelling after a surgery, go directly to the hospital and request ultrasound, an x-ray, a CT scan and/or an MRI to determine if a surgical tool was left inside of your body.
Another common mistake is one that nightmares are made of and that is losing a patient. Hospitals, Assisted Living Facilities, Rehabilitation Centers and Nursing Homes often care for people suffering from dementia, mental illness, and brain injuries. Unfortunately, facilities don’t always adhere to their procedures and safeguards and patients sometimes wander away. Incidents of elderly patients wandering away from their care facilities are quite common. The worst of these occur when a patient is unable to regain access to the facility and die of exposure outside of the facility. With today’s technology, this should NEVER happen. If you have a relative that is being cared for in one of the aforementioned facilities, I strongly suggest investigating the use of a GPS anklet. It could save the life of your loved one.
The fourth mistake mentioned in this article is hard to imagine, but TRUE. Fake doctors. Yes, you read that right. F-A-K-E doctors. Just recently, a teenager by the name of Malachi Love-Robinson was arrested for impersonating a doctor at the New Birth New Life Center for Medical and Urgent Care in West Palm Beach, Florida. The teenager, who has no medical training said the situation has been blown out of proportion and that he has always been interested in naturopathic treatment and herbal remedies. He has been charged with practicing medicine without a license, forgery, and grand theft. My suggestion, do your own research. Locate your doctor on the internet and verify his or her credentials. You can research board certified doctors by visiting www.certificationmatters.org. When possible, ask your primary doctor for referrals.
Next up, long waits in hospital waiting rooms. The CNN article refers to a tragic case of a two-year old who lost her limbs because a triage nurse took it upon herself to diagnose the obvious signs of liver failure as a “rash” and made the family wait an excrutiating five hours in the ER waiting room to be seen by a doctor. The child was suffering from a Strep infection that could have been treated with antibiotics. To avoid this, call or ahead or look up the ER wait times of your hospital while on the way to the ER. I also suggest calling your family doctor and asking him or her to call the hospital before your arrival. Doctors and nurses listen to other doctors often more than the patients themselves.
The next medical mistake profiled by CNN is one that happened very close to home. Nineteen year old, Blake Fought, a resident of Blacksburg, VA and a student at Radford University became dehydrated due to a minor illness. On the day Blake was to be discharged, his parents were in his hospital room waiting for a nurse to take out his central line IV. What they didn’t know as they gathered his things and began to prepare to take their son home, was that the nurse commissioned to do this very standard procedure had never done it before and had no idea what she was doing. She performed the procedure incorrectly and as air bubbles began to enter his bloodstream and travel to his heart and lungs, he began to gasp for air. Her only action was to tell Blake to calm down. She never called for a doctor. He died in front of his parents that day at the age of 20.
The next one is infection. Some of us may have a hard time blaming doctors and nurses when we are sickened by a virus or bacteria. But studies show that most infections are transmitted in hospitals and nursing homes by the people who work there to care for sick patients. The solution is a simple one, doctors, nurses and all other personnel must wash their hands before and after every interaction with a patient. Unfortunately, Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital struggles so much with hospital related infections that the Center for Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement is withholding 2.6 million dollars in payments. Hospitals that score in the lowest 25% nationwide on measurable infection prevention protocols are subject to the penalty. Many hospitals are also discovering that medical instruments and surgical tools also spread infectious disease. If you expect to be hospitalized for a scheduled surgery, I encourage you to use the following website to compare hospital ratings https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/results.html.
The eighth medical malpractice mistake listed in the article involves the use of feeding tubes and the chest tubes. The tubes used for these purposes often look very much alike. Multiple tubes may be used on a patient at a time. Some of these tubes are meant deliver medicine, others are meant to deliver nutrition. Because the tubes look alike, a nurse or caregiver may confuse the tubes and put medication or nutrition in the wrong one. The results of this can be deadly. If medication is delivered directly to a major organ like the heart for example, rather than the stomach, the medication may cause the heart to stop beating.
Number nine on today’s list is operating on the wrong body part. But operating on the wrong body part is only a portion of a much larger phenomenon. Mix-ups with surgery often involve wrong-site, wrong patient, and wrong procedure medical malpractice. Unconscious patients unable to communicate can not identify themselves and remind their doctor what procedure they are expecting to have done. In other cases the body part may have been mislabeled on the medical record and the doctor will perform the correct procedure but on the wrong body part.
And lastly, waking up during surgery. While most of these sound eerily like a Stephen King movie, this one scares me the most. Unfortunately there are several documented cases of patients not receiving large enough doses of anesthesia and waking up during surgery. Many are conscious but completely paralyzed and unable to communicate. They can also feel pain. If you are scheduled for surgery in the near future, be sure to check references for your anesthesiologist as well as your surgeon.
If you or a loved one has been harmed by something you believe to be medical malpractice, call The Thomson Law Firm for a FREE case evaluation. (540) 777-4900
