Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

A newspaper’s detailed account of a teenage girl who suffered brain damage and eventually died because of negligence during what should have been a routine outpatient procedure was presented to Congress last week by patients rights advocates, according to an account in the Sacramento Bee.

The girl suffered brain damage during what should have been a routine procedure at a Los Angeles area hospital operated by UCLA. She never regained consciousness and died shortly after her parents authorized the removal of her respirator. What is truly shocking about this case, however, is the lengthy battle the girl’s parents had to go through just to get the hospital to level with them about what happened – and the difficulties they experienced in finding a medical malpractice attorney willing to take the case because of statutory limits on medical malpractice damages.

Hospitals and doctors claim such limits are necessary to curb frivolous lawsuits. In many states, however, the effect has been to shield the medical industry from accountability for negligence, particularly negligence leading to wrongful deaths here in Oregon and elsewhere around the country. Relatively low damage limits, in particular, can create an incentive for hospitals to stall families and their wrongful death attorneys with the goal of making the case too expensive for a personal injury or medical malpractice lawyer to pursue.

A medical journal study released this month offers alarming evidence about the long-term prospects for stroke victims and raises broader questions about the way hospitals treat them. The study, originally published in the medical journal Stroke, and reported on by a number of mainstream media outlets, found that, as summarized by Bloomberg Businessweek: “within a year of having a stroke, almost two-thirds of Medicare patients die or wind up back in the hospital.”

According to Businessweek, the study looked at data covering over 91,000 Medicare patients at 625 hospitals nationwide. It covered the years 2003 to 2006 and found no change in the rates of rehospitalization or death over that period. One caveat, noted by outside experts interviewed by the magazine, is that a study like this – one focusing on older patients – can have a difficult time controlling for other medical issues the patients may be experiencing.

The study uncovered a death rate of 14.1 percent within the first 30 days after a stroke and 31.1 percent within a year. More alarmingly, “61.9 percent of stroke patients were readmitted to hospital or died within a year of their stroke,” Businessweek notes.

The 2008 death of a 25-year-old woman who was kept waiting at an Oregon hospital for more than six hours has prompted an Oregon wrongful death lawsuit directed against Springfield’s Sacred Heart Medical Center, according to the Associated Press.

The suit was filed by the woman’s parents, a couple from Eugene, who contend that the hospital’s failure to see and treat their daughter in a timely manner contributed to her death two days before Christmas 2008.

According to the AP, the woman, Martha Barr, arrived at the hospital around midday and was initially assessed by hospital staff as suffering from “shortness of breath, anxiety, fatigue, abnormally fast heart and respiration rates and low oxygen saturation.” It was, however, more than six hours before a doctor actually examined her. The doctor reportedly ordered a series of tests, but Barr went into “respiratory and cardiac arrest” before they could be performed and died just over two hours later. AP reports that in the Springfield wrongful death court papers the Eugene parents “contend that a long wait to see an emergency room doctor proved fatal for their daughter.”

As a recent report in The Oregonian details, Adventist Medical Center has witnessed a dramatic drop in Portland hospital deaths from bloodstream infections in the three-plus years since it instituted a new set of simple, but effective, safety procedures. The development is obviously good for patients, but it also has implications for Oregon wrongful death and medical malpractice claims related to our state’s hospitals.

The paper explains that in 2006 Adventist began implementing a set of relatively simple procedures developed at Maryland’s Johns Hopkins University. These involve medical professionals carefully checking each other to ensure thorough hand-washing before care-givers have contact with patients, greater attention to the use of antiseptics to clean patients skin and more extensive use of “full surgical regalia”.

As the paper reports, data collected by the state shows a dramatic drop in mortality and infection rates once the new procedures went into effect – especially when compared with other Portland area hospitals that do not follow the Johns Hopkins guidelines. The newspaper, citing Adventist’s director of quality resources, reports that there have been no ICU infections at the hospital since the spring of 2007.