Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine cancer surgeon and researcher, was interviewed online about his new book titled, “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care”. The title tells it like it is. Here are some key quotes from his interview:
• Hospitals across the nation have “alarmingly high error rates”.
• “1 in 4 hospital patients are harmed by a mistake”
We should learn from our mistakes. Actually, a famous New York law professor and commentator, David Siegel, always says that we should learn from others’ mistakes. That’s a much less painful way of learning.
Having practiced as a Central and Syracuse New York personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer for many years, I sometimes get the impression that corporations, hospitals and doctors do not learn from others’ mistakes (the pain-free way) or even from their own (the painful way). They just repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Sure, that keeps someone like me in business, but wouldn’t it be better for the rest of us if hospitals and others learned from their mistakes, minimized them, and put me out of business? (Don’t worry about me – I can always be a greeter at Walmart, if they don’t mind that I have sued them a couple of times).
The title of this blog post is from the 70’s song “Light My Fire” by the Doors, a song that propelled the group to rock & roll fame. I don’t think Jim Morison wrote that song from a hospital bed. But if he had, he might have found a surgeon willing to accommodate him.
Believe it or not, setting a patient on fire during surgery is not so uncommon. In fact, it is so not-uncommon that the day before yesterday the FDA hosted a webinar titled, “Practical Advice for Preventing Surgical Fires–Safety Strategies from the Front Lines”. The program description states that “there are an estimated 550 to 650 surgical fires per year in operating rooms in the U.S.” What usually happens is that either an alcohol-based antiseptic or an oxygen supply is ignited when contacted by an electrical cauterizing or scalpel device. The sad thing is that these fires and the resulting injuries (which are often gruesome) are entirely preventable.
I blogged several weeks ago about a Syracuse NY medical malpractice case where the patient caught fire during a routine c-section. Incredibly, the hospital and doctor responsible admitted “responsibility” for the fire while denying “liability” to the patient (go figure . . .)
The New York Times reported today on a new play, titled “Love Alone“, about a fatal surgical medical mistake, and how it affected the family of the deceased victim, and the doctor who blew it. Although I haven’t seen the play (yet), the story line rings true to how medical malpractice spins its ugly web. Here’s how:
At first, the family does not know a medical error was responsible for their loved one’s death, and, of course, no one at the hospital tells them. This sure rings true!
Then the daughter, who finds it odd that her mother died during such a routine surgical procedure, gets a hold of the intraoperative report, which, strangely, is missing pages. This rings true, too. Just ask any New York medical malpractice lawyer about the kinds of strange erasures and missing pages that show up in some medical records.
If your tummy just happened to catch fire during a C-section (yes, I said catch fire) and caused you permanent, painful napalm-like burn injuries, would you wonder if your doctor made some kind of mistake? In fact, would you wonder if he was a witch practicing some form of hell art?
This is pretty much the story of a Crouse Hospital medical malpractice case filed in Onondaga County, New York. The patient knew something was wrong when, as the doctor cut away down there, she started smelling something burning. Little did she know it was her! When she mentioned the smell to the doc and nurses, they responded, “nothing to worry about”, but then there was smoke. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “I see the smoke,” her mother said, who was standing right beside her.
Apparently, an electrical cauterizing tool the doctor was using lit the alcohol-based antiseptic they had spread on her skin. This was a risk the manufacturer had warned the Hospital about just a month before the surgery, and had given specific instructions on how to avoid, but clearly the instructions were ignored.
The Syracuse Post Standard ran an Article this weekend titled, “The stats the hospital industry doesn’t want you to know”. The article talked about a recent Medicare study revealing that patients in Syracuse area hospitals often get worse, instead of better, because they become victims of preventable “hospital-acquired conditions” (“HAC”), which consist of such things as patient falls, infections, foreign objects being left in patients after surgery, bedsores, poor blood sugar control for diabetes, and wrong blood transfusions. The statistics are alarming: In an 18-month period between 2008 and 2010, our local hospitals had 175 cases of Medicare patients developing “hospital-acquired conditions”.
All this may surprise some, but it does not come as a surprise to Syracuse medical malpractice lawyers like those at Michaels Bersani Kalabanka. We have successfully sued several local hospitals for these types of failures.
Here are some examples of our local hospitals’ failures during the Medicare-reported time period: Upstate Hospital had 5 times the national average of blood infections from catheters; St. Joseph’s had the 5 times the national rate of urinary tract infections; and there were five cases of foreign objects being left in patients after surgery — two at Crouse Hospital, two at Upstate and one at St. Joe’s.
Here at Michaels Bersani Kalabanka, we are pretty down to earth and modest. We don’t go around calling the press about our Central and Syracuse New York personal injury or medical malpractice settlements or verdicts, although we feel they are pretty impressive. You can see some of them here.
Most of our clients prefer to keep a low profile, and so do we. All they want is justice, not fame . Same with us.
But the press has a mind of its own. For instance, one of my partners, Lee Michaels, started a Seneca Falls medical malpractice trial this past Monday. Lee sued, on behalf of the window of a medical malpractice victim, two Rochester Neurosurgeons. On Tuesday, a front-page article appeared in the Geneva Finger Lakes Times about the trial. No one at our office called the press or let them know Lee was starting a serious medical malpractice trial in Seneca Falls. None of us thought this was newsworthy. It is just one of many Central New York medical malpractice cases that go to trial every year.
New York dental malpractice lawyers agree on one thing: You have to turn down most calls about dental malpractice. Most alleged dental malpractice cases are going nowhere. We get calls from people all the time. They got a bad result from their dentistry work, and they want to sue. But usually the bad result was a “known risk” of the procedure. When it’s a known risk, usually there’s no case. Sometimes there really was dental negligence, but then the injury is too small to really warrant a dental malpractice lawsuit. Getting a case with provable negligence, plus a significant injury, well, that doesn’t happen every day.
But a case I read about in the Syracuse Post Standard this week is more than just a dental malpractice case. I would describe it as a dental assault and battery case. It’s a god-awful story about ten Syracuse-area families who sued a dental clinic, “Small Smiles”, alleging their children had been subjected to unnecessary dental treatment, and without anesthesia.
That last part kills me. Imagine having your kids subjected to dental torture, and for no good medical reason? Can you say, “Marathon Man“? If these allegations are true, and apparently they are (Small Smiles’ national parent corporation settled with the Federal Government for $24 Million for Medicaid fraud based on the same facts) the case might well warrant punitive damages, which is all but unheard of in medical or dental malpractice cases.
My outrage at New York doctors and hospitals, who recently tried to sneak into our State budget a booby-trap to explode on their unsuspecting malpracticed patients, has still not subsided. Read my recent blogs about their underhanded efforts here and here. Readers’ digest version: They tried to slip a “cap on non-economic damages” for medical malpractice lawsuits into our State budget. Fortunately, their efforts failed. But believe me, New York medical doctors’ lobbyists will try it again. Their motto is, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again”.
So forgive me if I rant a while longer. They will keep at it, so why shouldn’t I?
New York doctors and hospitals keep whining about skyrocketing insurance premiums, which they choose to blame not on greedy insurance companies, but on New York malpractice claimants and their New York medical malpractice lawyers. But when juries hammer doctors with big verdicts, it’s because the doctors hammered their patients with big harm — carelessly. Juries reluctantly bang out big verdicts to compensate big screw ups. Those juries have found the doctors’ treatment of their patient so pathetic – wait, let’s be generous — “crappy” – as to fall below any acceptable standard of medical care.
New York Medical malpractice victims, you might not know it, but you just dodged a bullet! The New York hospital and physician lobby just tried to cut the legs off your rights to compensation. They tried to get the governor to incorporate into his budget a provision that would have capped all medical malpractice pain and suffering verdicts at $250,000. I already blogged about the unfairness of such a rule.
Good news: The doctor lobby failed! The final budget, which has now become law, tossed out the ill-conceived medical malpractice cap. And that is cause for celebration, not only by New York medical malpractice lawyers, but also by New York medical malpractice victims and their families.
Turns out the doctors and hospitals are poor losers. In a letter from Medical Society of the State of New York President Dr. Leah McCormack to his fellow doctors, he says he is “more than disappointed” that the budget did not include the cap. He feels “angry, disgusted and betrayed”.
Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog