Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

New York Medical malpractice cases, like medical malpractice cases everywhere, are tough. Juries like doctors. They feel sorry for doctors who are sued. They don’t want to tell physicians they were “negligent”. Doctors’ insurance company lawyers fight like hell to disparage the patient in front of the jury, to make the patient seem untrustworthy, and to paint their client-doctor as a helpless, honest victim of a greedy medical malpractice lawyer. These strategies sometimes work. Even when juries think a doctor made a mistake, or was careless, they sometimes refuse to find them liable for the injuries they carelessly caused. They justify such verdicts by saying to themselves things like, “gee, that doctor didn’t MEAN to hurt the patient”. Statistically, the doctor beats the patient in most New York medical malpractice lawsuits that go trial.

So when a New York medical malpractice lawyer brings a medical malpractice lawsuit all the way to trial, and wins, it is cause for celebration (not for the doctor or her insurance carrier, of course, but for the patient and her lawyer).

Today we celebrate the victory of our friends and fellow Syracuse medical malpractice attorneys David Howe and Michael Porter who, on May 7, won for their client a thumbs-up verdict in a Syracuse medical malpractice lawsuit. The patient’s surgeon had committed malpractice by negligently severing nerves in her ankles during a tarsal tunnel syndrome surgery several years ago. This caused significant limitation in her ability to move her feet, as well as permanent and severe pain to her feet and ankles, and eventually caused her to lose her job. The Syracuse jury awarded the patient $678,000 in compensation.

There is good news for open-heart surgery patients in Syracuse, New York: New York State’s Health Department reported this week that Syracuse’s Upstate (SUNY) Hospital’s death rate for open-heart surgery has dramatically improved: In 2005 SUNY Hospital had one of the highest death rates for open-hear surgery in New York State, with a death rate of 5.34%, but by 2007 it had one of the lowest. The rate now is .5 %, or one in 200 deaths, the third lowest out of 40 New York State hospitals. The average was just under 2%. St Joseph’s Hospital Health Center, the only other Central New York hospital where open-heart surgery is performed, had a rate of 2.27 %, just above average.

Upstate officials claim the improved death rate is due to, among other things, a renewed focus on quality and safety. Those improvements must be applauded. Medical malpractice is, unfortunately, rampant throughout the United States, including in New York State, and including at fine hospitals such as Syracuse’s SUNY. We know. We took a more than $2.5 million Syracuse New York medical malpractice verdict against SUNY two years ago for its malpractice of a Parkinson’s patient. SUNY Hospital’s medical malpractice paralyzed and brain-damaged our elderly client. How? The Hospital’s surgeon had performed the delicate brain surgery using poorly maintained brain surgery instrument that malfunctioned during the surgery.

Harvard researchers have conducted samples showing that as many as 1% of patients treated in New York State hospitals, such as SUNY, are injured, and of those, one fourth die, as a result of medical mistakes. One in a hundred needless injuries, including one in four hundred needless deaths, might not seem like a lot to some, but to us it seems unacceptable. Remember, we are talking about NEEDLESS deaths and injuries. And all that is needed to prevent them is a system that focuses on avoiding mistakes. For example the case where we got a $2.5 million verdict against Upstate Hospital for medical malpractice, all that was needed to avoid the medical malpractice was a system of checking and double checking for proper equipment maintenance.

“Help, this woman is bleeding to death! Is there a doctor in the house?”

But no doctor intervened, and poor Diane McCabe died a slow death. In fact, it took her 15 hours to bleed to death. Why couldn’t they stop the bleeding? Was she in some remote location with no access to a hospital? Nope. In fact she bled to death in an Albany Medical Center Hospital in New York State where she had undergone a C-section. After the surgeon finished the Cesarean procedure, and stitched McCabe back up, he left to attend to other patients. A physician attending to McCabe then called him several times to report that McCabe appeared to be bleeding internally, and asked the surgeon to open her back up. Despite these calls to action, the surgeon refused to intervene until it was too late. McCabe had lost too much blood.

Diane McCabe’s family settled her Albany New York medical malpractice claim last week for $5.2M against the (ir)responsible surgeon and Albany Medical Center Hospital. Since Diane left behind two small children and a grieving husband, this does not seem like too much money. In fact, it seems a little light. But her family got something much more important than money to them, something very unusual in an upstate New York medical malpractice case (or in any malpractice case anywhere): They got the Hospital to agree to implement safety improvements to make it unlikely the same thing would happen again. And they got the Hospital to agree to fund, for the next 20 years, a Diane McCabe Memorial Quality (patient safety) Lecture series. In other words, they got what amounts to an apology, some remorse, and some assurance that the Hospital would learn from its mistake.

Lawyers who handle nursing home neglect, negligence and abuse cases in the Syracuse and Central New York area are never surprised to see local nursing homes cited and fined for serious deficiencies. In fact, what is surprising is that more fines and citations are not issued. Bad conditions in nursing homes are pandemic, not only here in Central New York, but all across the United States.

So we at Michaels Bersani Kalabanka were not surprised to read in yesterday’s Post-Standard that three Syracuse-area nursing homes were recently fined for serious deficiencies that harmed patients. And for at least two of them, this was not the first time. The three nursing homes, and their wrongdoings, are:

St. Camillus Health & Rehabilitation Center in Geddes, cited and fined for serving a regular meal to a resident who was supposed to get pureed food. The resident choked, was hospitalized and subsequently died.

A New York Times article today, written by two fourth-year Harvard Medical School students, describes the frightening pervasiveness of medical malpractice in the United States, and the medical profession’s seemingly incorrigible habit of turning a blind eye to it. In my blog post today I will extract the article’s pearls of wisdom, and hand them to you, my reader. If you want the full oyster, shell and all, I highly recommend the full article.

The authors start by summarizing some of the more alarming studies that have catapulted medical malpractice to the headlines in recent years, including the famous (or infamous) Institute of Medicine Report in 1999 estimating that medical errors kill as many as 98,000 people a year, and a more recent New England Journal of Medicine study with similar findings.

Most interesting, though, was the authors’ discussion of recent polls of medical students regarding their experience with medical malpractice. Surprisingly, a poll of third-year students revealed that most students had already witnessed medical errors (and they aren’t even doctors yet!) or had committed errors themselves, but did not know what to do about it, who to report it to, or how to handle it. The system just wasn’t set up to admit, explore, or learn from medical error.