Georgia Injury Lawyer Blog

MRSA is a staph becteria which has been in the news in recent years as serious problems have been reported in hospitals and other health care facilities. Staph bacteria, even those that aren't resistant to antibiotics, have long caused serious infections.

In the 1960s, the first reports surfaced of staph infections that had stopped responding to the antibiotic methicillin. Over the decades, those strains have spread, and the germs have developed resistance to other drugs, largely in hospitals where they infect patients weakened by disease or made vulnerable through surgical wounds and catheters.

MRSA still poses the greatest threat in hospitals, where strains are usually genetically different and, because of antibiotic use, more difficult to kill than those circulating out in the community. About 85 percent of life-threatening, invasive MRSA infections involve people who have been hospitalized, lived in a nursing home or been treated in some other health care facility.

During the 1980s, doctors began finding cases of MRSA in people who hadn't spent time in health care settings. Unlike the strains found in hospitals, MRSA in the community tended to cause skin infections — pus-filled pimples and boils.

Community MRSA still responds to a wider range of antibiotics, and it is unusual for community infections to become life-threatening. However, a study reported last year that more life-threatening community infections occur than previously thought.

The study, estimated MRSA infections in health care facilities and the community killed nearly 19,000 Americans in 2005. Another 94,000 had life-threatening infections.

However, the study found that 85% of life-threatening MRSA infections involved people who have been infected while hospitalized or living in a nursing home. Only about 15 percent happened in the community.
People 65 and older are most likely to suffer invasive MRSA infections of all types, the study found. Black people had invasive MRSA at nearly twice the rate of whites.

The important thing to remember is that those who seek help from a doctor usually are successfully treated. One should not ignore these problems.

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Medical Malpractice takes many forms. In this article, we write about a unusual but dangerous medical error that can cause lifetime consequences for an innocent patient.

Though most everyone knows that sharing needles is unsafe in today’s world, sharing or reusing syringes can be equally dangerous. During any health related injection, a tiny amount of blood is often inadvertently drawn back into a syringe. Most of the time, that does not make a difference because it is common practice to use a new syringe and a new needle for subsequent injections. But in some cases, those involved may change the needle but not the syringe. They then use that syringe to draw more medicine from a vial. By doing so, the small amount of blood that may have been in the dirty syringe inadvertently flows back into the vial contaminating the entire vial.

We read recently in an article in USA Today about a lady by the name of Evelyn McKnight who has founded a patient advocacy group entitled HONOReform. Ms. McKnight apparently was infected with Hepatitis C which has caused her to be chronically fatigued and has compromised the quality of her life significantly. Apparently, she was infected with this disease when someone reused a syringe even though a clean needle was used during a chemotherapy treatment for her cancer. Quite literally, she went to a doctor to be healed but then came away with a life threatening illness. To keep that from happening elsewhere, she has founded the patient advocacy group HONOReform, that uses education and advocacy to try to stop the kind of medical errors by which blood borne diseases can be transmitted. Unfortunately for Ms. McKnight and others who have been given Hepatitis C from unclean syringes, there is no universal cure for the disease. 20% immediately develop acute infections and symptoms ranging from jaundice to fatigue, however, 75 to 85 percent may develop a chronic infection but may not exhibit symptoms for many years. Some may die of liver disease.

Because dangerous medical errors such as the reuse of a syringe can pass on blood borne infections, the work of patient advocacy groups like HONOReform obviously is important in educating the public and the medical community about this form of medical malpractice. In today’s world, it is inexcusable to reuse syringes because deadly diseases can be passed on to the innocent. One would think that this lesson would have been learned with respect to syringes but apparently there are still those who believe that only needles need to be replaced. This type of medical error can have lifelong and profound consequences as is reflected in Ms. McKnight’s case. We applaud the work of HONOReform in addressing it.

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Lasik vision correction surgery has been performed in the United States for almost ten years. It has become a massive business with specialized centers opening in most markets and advertising freedom from glasses. However, not everyone's a good candidate and some suffer life-changing side effects — lost vision, dry eye, night-vision problems.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration is beginning a major new effort to see if warnings about the risks are strong enough. The FDA estimates that approximately 5 percent of patients are dissatisfied, but be more specific due to the lack of data. The FDA is now working with eye surgeons in a major study expected to enroll hundreds of Lasik patients to try to better understand who has bad outcomes and exactly what their complaints are.

About 7.6 million Americans have undergone some form of laser vision correction, including the Lasik procedure. In performing the Lasik procedure, doctors cut a flap in the cornea — the clear covering of the eye— aim a laser underneath it and zap to reshape the cornea for sharper sight.

The vast majority, 95 percent, of patients see more clearly after Lasik. However, some patients have severe complications that leave poor vision. Other side effects, such as dry eye can range from an annoyance to so severe that people suffer intense pain and need surgery to retain what little moisture their eyes form.

Dry eye is common even among people who never have eye surgery, and increases as people age. Solomon says 31 percent of Lasik patients have some degree of it before the surgery, and that about 5 percent worsen afterwards.

The FDA has long known of those side effects, and thus for years has a Web site with warnings for Lasik patients and required that doctors give every potential patient a brochure outlining risks..

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An article in the New England Journal of Medicine, warns that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records.

The authors are proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions. But their concern is that the medical profession and policymakers have not begun to understand the implications of companies like Microsoft and Google becoming the hosts for patient information in their data centers.

Today, most patient records remain within the health system. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is the main law that regulates personal data handling and patient privacy.

Microsoft and Google have recently begun offering web-based personal health records. But as noted in the article, these companies are not bound HIPPA.

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An analysis of 41 million Medicare patient records, released April 8 by HealthGrades, a health care ratings organization, found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were, on average, 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.

From 2004 through 2006, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S. Medicare patients and cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion, according to the fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.

The overall medical error rate was about 3 percent for all Medicare patients, which works out to about 1.1 million patient safety incidents during the three years included in the analysis.

Among the other findings:

Patients who experienced a patient safety incident had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of the incident.

The overall death rate among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.

Over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting.

The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure. Together, they accounted for 63.4 percent of incidents. Failure to rescue improved 11.1 percent from 2004 to 2006, while both bed sores and post-operative respiratory failure worsened during that time.

Of the 270,491 deaths that occurred among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents, 238,337 were potentially preventable, the researchers said.

If all hospitals performed at the level of the top-ranked hospitals, about 220,106 patient safety incidents and 37,214 patient deaths could have been avoided, and about $2 billion could have been saved.

Starting Oct. 1, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will stop reimbursing hospitals for the treatment of eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain kinds of post-surgical infections.

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Our Atlanta based medical malpractice lawyers frequently handle cases involving medication errors in hospitals. Some of these cases result in catastrophic damages.

A research study published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics determined that medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses and bad drug reactions harm roughly one out of 15 hospitalized children. The number is far higher than earlier estimates and bolsters concerns already heightened by well publicized cases such as the accidental drug overdose of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins last November. Quaid's twins got life-threatening heparin overdoses in a Los Angeles hospital.

Researchers found a rate of 11 drug-related harmful events for every 100 hospitalized children. That compares with an earlier estimate of two per 100 hospitalized children, based on traditional detection methods. The rate reflects the fact that some children experienced more than one drug treatment mistake. The new estimate translates to 7.3 percent of hospitalized children, or about 540,000 kids each year, a calculation based on government data.

Simply relying on hospital staffers to report such problems had found less than 4 percent of the problems detected in the new study.
A new monitoring method developed for the study is a list of 15 "triggers" on young patients' charts that suggest possible drug-related harm. It includes use of specific antidotes for drug overdoses, suspicious side effects and certain lab tests.

The researchers said their findings highlight the need for "aggressive, evidence-based prevention strategies to decrease the substantial risk for medication-related harm to our pediatric inpatient population."
Patient safety experts said the problem is most likely even bigger than the study suggests because it involved only a review of selected charts. Also, the study didn't include general community hospitals, where most U.S. children requiring hospitalization are treated.

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On Friday, April 4, 2008, the District Court of Appeals, First District, State of Florida upheld the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation’s suspension of Allstate from writing insurance in the State of Florida.

Allstate had been suspended weeks before for refusing to produce documents during an investigation of the company. The Florida market comprises 17% of Allstate’s national sales.

The court found Allstate guilty of arbitrary reductions of “bodily injury claim payments to its policyholders and beneficiaries by up to 20%.” It also determined that Allstate was engaged in ongoing criminal activity by failing to cooperate with the Office of Insurance Regulation’s investigation of a crime, and that this constituted a danger to the public health, safety or welfare of citizens.

Realizing the seriousness of this, given a pending shareholder lawsuit against the company for other problems resulting from the company’s refusal to turn over the documents in several cases nationally, Allstate posted 150,000 documents on their web site.

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If you think the prescription drug you took for headaches caused your heart attack, the Food and Drug Administration says you can't sue the maker for injury if it met agency standards. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says you can't sue a mattress maker if your mattress bursts into flame despite meeting CPSC standards. Companies making sport utility vehicles would get similar protection from suits brought by people injured or the families of those killed in rollovers under National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposals for stronger roofs.

Consumer advocates call this "silent tort reform." It is part of the tension between state and federal law that has existed since the nation's founding. If there is a conflict, state laws must yield under Article 6 of the Constitution. But where there is no federal law, federal courts must defer to laws of the state where a lawsuit is heard. Big business and insurance companies are now using this to avoid responsibility for negligent actions and omissions at the expense of innocent consumers.

Under the Bush administration, a developing body of judicial opinion could place new limits on the rights of those who buy or use products. It also could mean the savings of billions of dollars by companies insulated from lawsuits.

Federal agencies are increasingly promulgating rules favorable to big business and insurance companies at the expense of ordinary citizens. They then assert their rules override state tort and product-liability laws. In a novel approach, these agencies are claiming that the preemptive effect is based on statements in the introductions to their rules, not the rules themselves.

The practice varies by agency but is spreading. It delights corporate defense lawyers. The argument is that federal agencies are the absolute rule-makers.

Actor Dennis Quaid and his wife are preparing to fight such a contention — this one made by the FDA — in a suit accusing Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter Healthcare Corp. of putting vastly different doses of a blood-thinner into confusingly similar packages. The Quaids went to court in November 2007, after their infant twins were given 1,000 times more heparin than babies should get. Their suit contends Baxter should have changed the packaging after three babies died in 2006 at an Indianapolis hospital.

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Posted In: Dangerous Drugs , Insurance Company Abuse , Medical Malpractice , Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Liability , Products Liability , Torts

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Our Atlanta medical malpractice attorneys on occasion review cases in which surgical procedures are performed on the wrong side of the body.

Last Tuesday there was a report of a wrong site surgery at a Minnesota hospital. Surgeons at the hospital mistakenly removed the wrong kidney from a patient. The surgery was performed last Tuesday at Methodist Hospital in Minneapolis, but it wasn't until the next day that it was discovered that the wrong kidney had been removed. A pathology examination of the removed kidney determined that it was healthy.

The doctor who removed the kidney was a veteran surgeon. The hospital while accepting responsibility for the actions, has pointed a finger at a paperwork mistake.

Most hospitals have safety measures in place designed to prevent wrong-site surgery, including marking body parts to be operated on in advance of surgery and requiring a "time out" in the operating room to give surgical staff a chance to double check documentation and voice any concerns.

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Many surgery patients report that they awake during surgery. They say it feels like being trapped in a corpse, unable to move or scream. Some remember hearing their surgeons talk, and a few recall feeling intense pain.

Each year, as many as 40,000 of the 21 million patients undergoing surgery in the United States may experience inadequate anesthesia, leading to anxiety and even post-traumatic stress disorder if patients regain consciousness, according to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

A widely used device that employs brainwaves to help doctors prevent patients from waking up during surgery is no more effective than an older, far less costly technique, researchers said on Wednesday. A study of nearly 2,000 patients reported in The New England Journal of Medicine showed the BIS device, made by Aspect Medical Systems Inc., did not help doctors prevent any more patients from waking up while under inhaled anesthesia.

The researchers concluded that reliance on BIS technology may provide patients and health care practitioners with a false sense of security about the reduction in the risk of anesthesia awareness. They reported that if BIS monitoring were routinely applied to all patients in the United States, the cost of disposable electrodes alone would exceed $360 million annually.

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In 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man, near death, was taken into an operating room at a California hospital in order to harvest his organs for donation. Law enforcement officials contend that what occurred in the operating room was a criminal act. The surgeon, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh has been criminally charged with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs, apparently in an attempt to hasten Mr. Navarro’s death to retrieve his organs sooner. The doctor is facing three felony counts relating to his actions

Central to the case is whether Dr. Roozrokh was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as donation after cardiac death. Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty.

Transplanting organs from patients whose hearts have stopped, or cardiac-death donations, began to go out of vogue in the late 1960s and early ’70s after medical advances like life support and subsequent changes in the legal definition of death made donations from those declared brain dead more efficient. But health officials have encouraged cardiac-death donations in recent years.

There were 670 cardiac-death donations through the first nine months of 2007, the most in any year this decade, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ allocation. Over the same period, there were 12,553 brain-dead donations, according to the network.
In brain-death donations, the donor is legally dead, but machines keep the organs viable by machines. In cardiac-death donations, after the patient’s ventilator is removed, the heart slows. Once it stops, brain function ceases. Most donor protocols call for a five-minute delay before the patient is declared dead. Transplant teams are not allowed in the room of the potential donor before that.

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Lawyers who practice in the field of dangerous medical devices and drugs are never surprised to discover relationships between physicians and pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Recently, questionable ties between supposedly objective researchers and the maker of an artificial spinal disk have come to light. An artificial spinal disk is a device that is used in place of conventional surgery during which patients’ vertebrae are fused.

In a study of nearly 240 patients with lower back pain, physicians reported that the artificial spine disk, manufactured by Prodisc, had worked much better than conventional fusion surgeries. A well-known spine specialist and one of the study’s researchers said in a 2006 news release that “as a surgeon, it is gratifying to see patients recover function more quickly than after fusion and return to their normal activities more easily.”

Discovery in a lawsuit against the manufacturer has disclosed that the surgeon had a large financial interest in the outcome of the study. So did other doctors at about half of the 17 research centers involved in the study. Federal law requires that manufacturers inform the Food and Drug Administration of researchers’ financial interest in a product or drug before the study is used to seek approval of a device. It is unclear whether the disk’s manufacturer made this information available to the FDA.

In the study results submitted to the FDA , an unusually large number of patients were not included. Some of those patients had very poor results. As a result, some doctors are very critical of the research stating that the study may have overstated the value of Prodisc. They point out that clinical researchers with financial conflicts have incentives to overstate the value of a new product.

Dr. Richard A. Deyo, a Professor at Oregon Health and Science University, summed up the matter in this way, “The surgeons themselves are guilty of being insufficiently critical of products and techniques they are developing. More people are more interested in getting on the gravy train than on stopping the gravy train.”

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Posted In: Dangerous Drugs , Medical Malpractice , Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Liability , Products Liability

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We have previously written about the dangers of medication errors in hospitals. Recently another incident made the news because a celebrity was involved. Actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins and another child were put in serious danger when they were administered overdoses of a blood thinner. The California Department of Public Health said the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center gave the newborns 1,000 times the intended dosage of heparin. Fortunately, all three children recovered, but two needed a drug that reverses the effects of heparin.

The authorities said the "violations caused, or were likely to cause, serious injury or death to the patients who received the wrong medication," and they faulted the hospital for its "deficient practices" around administrating the drug.

The regulators' found that the hospital did not adequately educate staff about safe use of heparin, which it described as a "high alert, high risk" blood thinner, and that nurses sometimes failed to adequately read labels on vials of the drug.

The hospital has apologized to the patients' families and said it made changes to prevent a recurrence, including providing more training and requiring four pharmacy workers to verify a high-alert medication before putting it in a patient care unit.

Quaid and his wife, have sued Baxter Healthcare Corp., the makers of heparin, accusing the firm of negligence in packaging different doses of the product in similar vials with blue backgrounds.
A similar dosage error killed three premature infants at an Indianapolis hospital in 2006. Three others survived overdoses.

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Our attorneys are increasingly reviewing cases where major surgical procedures are being performed at small physician-owned hospitals and surgical centers.

On January 10, 2008, the Washington Post revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, had issued a report concerning physician-owned specialty hospitals. The report concluded that most physician-owned speciality hospitals are poorly equipped to handle medical emergencies.

The report revealed that only 55% of the 109 physician-owned hospitals studied had emergency departments, and of those, the majority had only one bed. Fewer than a third of the hospitals had physicians on site at all times and 34% relied on dialing 911 to summon emergency medical assistance for patients who developed problems. Moreover, 7% of the hospitals failed to meet Medicare requirements that a registered nurse be on duty at all times and that at least one physician be on call or in the hospital.

Federal Medicare and Medicaid requirements do not require participating hospitals to have emergency departments, but do require they keep written policies for handling emergencies. They also cannot rely on summoning 911 services as a substitute for their own requirements of emergency care.

The issues concerning emergency care in physician-owned hospitals has been in the news recently. Last year, it was reported that a 44 year old truck driver went into respiratory arrest following elective surgery at a West Texas Hospital. The only recourse for the staff of the hospital was to call 911, which was done. But, by the time the man arrived at a larger hospital he was pronounced dead. Similarly, in 2005, it was reported that an 88 year old woman in recovery after elective back surgery suffered a heart attack after an injection of pain medication. Since no doctor was at the hospital, the nurses were forced to call 911. The lady was taken to a community hospital where she died later.

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Our medical malpractice attorneys are frequently forced to decline cases which have merit from a liability standpoint, but due to caps on the amount of recovery cannot be justified in economic terms.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times ran a story concerning a 72 year old woman who entered Stanford University Medical Center for double knee replacement surgery in April. Four days later, she was dead. Her son, an anesthesiologist, felt that the case was a classic case of medical malpractice. After the operation, his mother developed sharp abdominal pain which she described as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. The hospital failed to diagnose the cause of her pain and continued to treat her with pain relievers. Her vital signs became unstable and she was moved to an intensive care unit, but she died of complications from an undiagnosed and untreated bowel obstruction.

According to the story, state regulators found the hospital at fault and cited it. The anesthesiologist and his family decided to sue and approached 24 lawyers. All the lawyers declined to take the case for the same reason - the medical malpractice caps on the amount of recovery didn’t justify the expenses.

California law limits pain and suffering awards in medical malpractice cases to $250,000. Unless there is a large economic loss, the cost of bringing these types of lawsuits can exceed the limit of recovery. Similarly, Georgia’s $350,000 cap prevents many lawyers from taking cases involving elderly people, unemployed persons, and young people.

The anesthesiologist, who once was an advocate of so-called “tort reform” now opposes it. Almost 30 states have enacted similar legislation, and two Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Guiliani have recently endorsed a national approach to limits on recoveries.

Several states have set their malpractice caps considerably higher because of worries that they unfairly affect poor patients the most. In fact, some states have begun to examine the fairness of these caps especially, those not tied to the cost of inflation. The elected officials in Georgia seem content to allow the caps to remain in place.

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Our medical malpractice attorneys are many times forced to turn away cases against emergency rooms where the patient is injured by clear negligence. This is caused by the gross negligence standard for emergency departments adopted by the Legislature in 2005.

With the Georgia Legislature meeting this week, Senators from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, have joined to co-sponsor Senate Bill No. 286. This bill is designed to amend the provision of the so-called Tort Reform Bill initially passed in 2005, which essentially gave emergency rooms immunity from law suits. As part of the February 2005 bill, patients alleging malpractice in emergency rooms must prove gross negligence. Gross negligence is most often characterized under Georgia law as a reckless disregard for the safety of a patient, and in many cases has been interpreted to mean intentional harm.

Georgia’s gross negligence standard is the harshest in the country. Supporting this amendment are not only Republican and Democratic Senators, but Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). MADD Director, Denise Themes, has commented that victims of drunk driving accidents usually go directly to an emergency room for treatment. She points out that given the unique conditions in the statute, it’s nearly impossible for one of those victims to prove gross negligence after the fact.

A recent study by Harvard of more than 30,000 hospital records concluded that emergency rooms have more injuries caused by negligence than all other areas of the hospital combined. According to the Institute of Medicine, preventable medical errors kill as many as 98,000 Americans each year and seriously injure another one million. This makes medical errors the eighth leading cause of death in the United States, higher than deaths in automobile accidents, breast cancer and AIDS. This bill is a commendable bipartisan effort to correct a horrible injustice caused by the laws of Georgia.

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In a study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors concluded that in nearly one-third of cases of sudden cardiac arrest occurring in hospitals, the staff takes too long to respond, greatly increasing the risk of brain damage and death. The authors research indicates that these delays contribute to thousands of deaths a year in the United States alone.

The study was based on the records of 6,789 patients at 369 different hospitals whose hearts suffered from conditions that could be reversed by the use of an electronic defibrillator.

Experts say that the defibrillator shock should be administered to the patient within two minutes after the heart stops beating. But, the study found that it took longer in 30% of the cases. The results of the delays were striking. When the defibrillator was delayed, only 22.2% of patients survive long enough to be discharged from the hospital as opposed to 39.3% when the shock was administered properly.

The delays were found to be more likely in patients who suffered heart stoppages at night or on the weekends, or who were admitted for a non-cardiac illness in a hospital with fewer than 250 beds and in units without heart monitors.

The authors of the study surmised that the problem may be even more widespread than their study revealed. They pointed out that the hospitals which were part of the study have joined a national registry on cardiac arrest which means there have already adopted special efforts trying to meet guidelines involving the use of debibrillators. Thus, they feel that these hospitals actually performed better than the average hospital.

The authors estimated that 370,000 to 750,000 hospitalized patients have a cardiac arrest every year in the United States. They reported that in a third to one-half of the cases, the cardiac arrest is caused by an abnormal rhythm that can be corrected by a shock from a defibrillator.

The reasons for the delays were varied. Sometimes, especially at night and weekends, it was felt that not enough personnel were available in smaller hospitals. Also, in some hospitals, nurses other than those in intensive care units, were not allowed to use defibrillators. Another factor that the authors pointed out was that the traditional defibrillators used in hospitals require that a doctor or nurse look at the patient’s heartbeat, verify that the problem is correctable by the defibrillator, adjust the machine and deliver the shock. In contrast, the automatic defibrillators that have come into use in public places are meant to be used by laymen. They can be connected to the chest of someone who has collapsed, the machine will sense electro activity in the heart and deliver a shock only if it is needed. These devices are designed to be almost foolproof, but so far they have not been used widely in hospitals.

One expert in the field commented that some patients would be better off having a cardiac event in a shopping mall than in a hospital.

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The Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about fentanyl pain patches. The fentanyl skin patch contains fentanyl, a potent narcotic. The skin patch was approved by FDA in 1990 for use in patients with persistent, moderate-to-severe pain who have become opioid tolerant – meaning that they have been using another strong opioid narcotic pain medicine around-the-clock, and have been using the medicine regularly for a week or longer. The skin patch is most commonly prescribed for patients with cancer.

The FDA has continued to receive reports of deaths and life-threatening side effects after doctors have inappropriately prescribed the patch or patients have incorrectly used it.

In addition, the agency is asking manufacturers of all fentanyl patches to update their product information and to develop a medication guide for patients.

The FDA has received recent reports describing deaths and life-threatening side effects after doctors and other health care professionals inappropriately prescribed the patch to relieve pain after surgery, for headaches, or for occasional or mild pain in patients who were not opioid tolerant. In other cases, patients used the patch incorrectly: The patients replaced it more frequently than directed in the instructions, applied more patches than prescribed, or applied heat to the patch – all resulting in dangerously high fentanyl levels in the blood.

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Posted In: Dangerous Drugs , Medical Malpractice , Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Liability , Products Liability

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