Articles Posted in Medical Negligence

The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that plaintiffs could not argue that a surgeon should have disclosed his displinary history unless there was proof that the standard of care required disclosure.

The Court held that plaintiffs “never established that the standard of care required such disclosures. Rather, they ask us to adopt a different standard of care for a narrow class of plaintiffs. Not only is their approach unprecedented, it contravenes the Legislature’s adoption of the professional theory by supplanting, in a single narrow context, the Legislature’s judgment.”

The Court also held that the evidence was not admissible to impeach the defendant.

Steven and I have been having a discussion – it started here. Here is his latest missive:

“My mistake, I did not mean to state that this particular lawyer(s) was sleazy, but that the trial bar in general is sleazy. I will admit that there must be some decent trial attorneys just as there are bad doctors, cops, judges, etc.

As for your comment about doctors and EtOH, drugs, etc., it is true that many docs have problems, but experts and studies have shown that the last thing in their life they let go is often their career. This is probably true for most professions as well. Plus, I would never call someone with a disease sleazy, that would be “shallow.”

The Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled that the amounts of settlements made by doctor in other cases are not discoverable in another medical malpractice action against him.

The case is Miller v. Kelly; it is reported at 130 P.3d 982 (Ariz. App. 2006).

The Court held that “the amount paid in settlement of a claim establishes neither negligence nor gross negligence” and that the information is neither relevant nor reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. The Court noted that “[p]ermitting disclosure of amounts paid in settlement of a lawsuit contrary to an express provision ensuring the confidentiality of that information likely would discourage parties from settling. And disclosure of that information poses the risk that conclusions will be drawn about the paying party’s culpability and the degree of culpability based on the fact that payment was made and the amount.”

Go to the Tennessee Medical Malpractice Law Blog for a post on wrong site surgeries.

Teresa Sigmon, attorney for the defendant in a medical malpractice case, allegedly pressured one of the plaintiff’s consulting experts in the case into withdrawing from an agreement to testify for the plaintiff. The plaintiff then sued her, her law firm, and the the medical malpractice insurer for “abuse of process, intentional interference with a business relationship, inducement/procurement of a breach of contract, and coercion of a witness.” (The defendant doctor was also sued originally; that claim was dropped.)

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded all of the claims against the lawyer and her law firm for trial except the abuse of process claim.

The Court found the existence of a business relationship between the consultant and the plaintiff and found that a claim existed under both the interference and inducement theories.

It is getting worse. A study of patients in our Medicare population has found an alarming number of incidents and deaths.

The study looked discharge records of Medicare patients and used 16 of “20 indicators for potentially preventable patient safety incidents that could be readily identified in hospital discharge data. This tool set of 20 evidence-based PSIs was created and released to the public in 2003 to be used by various healthcare stakeholders to assess and improve patient safety in U.S. hospitals.”

They found:

The Washington Post tells us that hospital-acquired infections cost more than $600M per year – and that is just in Pennsylvania!

An excerpt from the article: “Doctors, nurses and patients’ relatives have long known the risks of contracting an infection while in a hospital. But there has been little quantifiable data available on the cost of those infections, from a financial or a medical perspective. The average hospital payment for a Pennsylvania patient who did not have an infection was $8,078, compared with $60,678 for patients who did, according to the report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if doctors and hospitals spent their time and money trying to prevent infections rather than trying to reduce their financial responsibility for negligence? The cost of malpractice insurance in a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of hospital-acquired infections.

John Ritter died of an aortic aneurysm in 2003. His family filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against various health care providers. It now appears that the case has been settled.

I met John Ritter in New York 5 or 6 years ago. I went to a play and at the end the cast came back onto the stage and auctioned off a prop to raise money for an AIDS group. I “won” the auction and got to go backstage, meet the cast (including Henry Winkler), get photos, etc. It was a good deal of fun.

The reason for that little story is this: John Ritter could not have been more gracious. He spent part of his life in Nashville (his dad was country music legend Tex Ritter), and actually lived in a beautiful house about 4 miles away from my house. We talked about Nashville and he told me what wonderful memories he had of my adoptive home. I could tell that he was a kind, compassionate man.

This op-ed piece from today’s New York Times is so good it needs to be repeated in full in this blog.

The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes
By PETER SALGO

WHEN politicians speak of America’s health care needs, they often miss an important point: the doctor-patient relationship has become frayed. Patients aren’t unhappy just because health care costs too much (though they would certainly like it to be more affordable). Rather, people sense a malaise within the system that has eroded the respect they feel patients deserve.

The locality rule in medical malpractice cases is absolutely ridiculous. It is designed to create an artifical barrier to recovery, to protect doctors and hospitals, particularly those in rural areas, from malpractice suits. It pretends that there is a difference in the standard of care given the size of the community, as if people from smaller towns are entitled to less quality of care than those of bigger towns.

(Don’t get me wrong – there are some services that hospitals in rural towns that are not and should not be provided and there are some doctors in rural areas who lack the practical experience of taking care of some types of patients. The patients who need this help need to referred to a place where such help is routinely given.)

Well, a doctor and his group in Clarksville just got bit by their own dog. A medical malpractice verdict for the plaintiff was reversed because the Court of Appeals found that the defendents’ experts did not meet the qualifications of the locality rule.