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The Facts on Medical Malpractice |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 06 August 2007 18:57 |
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You can read the facts about medical malpractice, rather than relying on urban legend. Some of the facts are right here. (You may need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to read the original source files. You can get it free here.) Medical errors kill 100,000 people per year, more people than highway traffic accidents. Medical malpractice insurance premiums have nothing to do with increases in health care costs. Malpractice insurance is cheap insurance for doctors, too. Compared to what you are paying for health insurance, doctors get a better deal on their malpractice insurance. The medical industry is no good at policing itself. |
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What are medical errors? |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 06 August 2007 18:25 |
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Medical errors are mistakes, plainly and simply put. The medical industry has numerous different names for their mistakes but the people in the industry are human, not superhuman. Thus, doctors, nurses, technicians all make mistakes, just like you and me. When the error occurs because of a breakdown in communication or in a complex system, it is still a communication or a system involving huymans, and a mistake is what happened. Whether they are called "unfortunate adverse outcomes", "preventable adverse outcomes", "misadventures", "innocent errors" or anything else, they are mistakes. Sometimes the result of a medical procedure or therapy is not the intended result and the patient is injured. If the unintended result occurred from a mistake, that is negligent care causing injury. That is malpractice. A mistake occurs when the action taken is not the action that should have been taken. It is not necessarily deliberate. It can be "innocent" yet be a mistake nonetheless. For instance, a nurse give aspirin to a patient who is allergic to aspirin and the patient dies. If the nurse knows or should have known that the patient was allergic to aspirin, that is a mistake, that is negligent acting. If the nurse did not know, perhaps because not even the patient knew that she was allergic to aspirin or perhaps because the patient had been unconscious and no history of allergy was available to anyone, that is an "adverse outcome" that is not preventable. However, if the allergy to aspirin was written on the chart and the nurse didn't see it, or if the doctor forgot to record the allergy to aspirin in the chart or if the nurse mistook the patient for another for one who was not allergic to aspirin or if the clerk forgot to put the big red ASPIRIN ALLERGY tag on the chart, or any of a multitude of other acts, then negligent acting is involved, a mistake was made and the result is what we call malpractice. |
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What is Malpractice? |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 06 August 2007 18:24 |
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The common thread in medical and legal malpractice is negligence or breach of the standard of care. 'That means that the lawyer or doctor made a mistake and did something that others in his or her profession consider unacceptable. The mistake is just that, a mistake. It is not necessarily deliberate wrongdoing, but it is also not excusable as something that happens "by accident." It is the choice of an act that is the wrong choice in the eyes of his or her professional (expert) colleagues. Obviously, a choice that is wrong in the eyes of some professionals (experts) may not be a wrong choice in the eyes of others. There are acts which are obvious negligence (cutting off the wrong leg) and other acts which are not so plain. The defense lawyer will always try to obscure the difference between a deliberate but wrong choice and an accidental injury. Lawyers who represent injured people sometimes call that the "s--t happens" defense. It is the job of the plaintiff's malpractice lawyer to discern the difference between "s--t happens" and a wrong act and to educate the judge and jury on the distinction so that the jury finds in favor of the client the lawyer represents. When the issue is cutting off the wrong leg, or in the case of a lawyer, missing a deadline for filing, the wrongdoer often tries to point the finger at someone or something else as the cause. The wrongdoing surgeon might point to the operating room nurse who exposed the wrong leg for his knife. The wrongdoing lawyer might point to the client as not giving the proper information and delaying the case. That type of defense is called "the dog ate my homework" defense. Once again, the malpractice lawyer's job is to identify the finger-pointing and flush out the real culprit. |
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100,000 Die |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 23 July 2007 15:41 |
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Highway accidents kill about 43,000 people annually. The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, says that medical mistakes kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people each year that die just in hospitals. That figure was published in 1999 and did not include deaths from errors in surgical centers, clinics, outpatient facilities like nursing homes or offices. So when I say that 100,000 people die each year from medical mistakes, I am underestimating from well-known and reliable figures. Here is the proof from the Institute of Medicine. One of the studies that underlay that evidence was done right here in Utah. |
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Malpractice Facts