New York Medical Malpractice

A jury in Westchester, New York has awarded a local family $7 million in a medical malpractice suit after a family member was misdiagnosed and died from severe brain damage. The woman even had several times to be correctly diagnosed with the pancreatic inflammation she had and was not.

The White Plains jury returned the verdict against the medical center to Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Colabella after a three-and-a-half-week trial and a day of deliberations. It awarded $3 million to Capwell’s three daughters, ages 7, 9 and 11 at the time of her death, and $4 million to her husband, Scott Capwell.

Livingston said Theresa Capwell was admitted to the medical center on Sept. 18, 2000, with symptoms indicating pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreatic gland, but doctors spent two weeks running tests for cancer.

When you enter a hospital for a routine procedure, you expect to come out of there as good or even better than when you entered. However, New York hospitals are becoming more and more unsanitary, and hospital infections “kill more people each year than AIDS, breast cancer and traffic accidents combined”.

Despite historical claims from hospitals that such infections are unavoidable risks associated with surgery, the reality is that most hospital-contracted infections are preventable through adherence to simple hygienic practices. These practices include mandating the hospital staff to wash their hands and properly sanitizing all surgical equipment.

There has been a recent wave of medical malpractice lawsuits against hospitals for hospital-acquired infections. For instance, a jury recently awarded over $2.5 million to a patient who contracted a staph infection during heart surgery. This is just one example of many successful trials around the country.

There has been renewed pressure on hospitals to do something about the problem. For one, New York hospitals are now required to report their hospital-acquired infection rates to the New York State Department of Health. Second, Medicare now refuses to reimburse for certain hospital-acquired infections, a development that means hospitals will be forced to pay the medical costs associated with the treatment of these illnesses.

Medical malpractice is a very serious business, but it is refreshing sometimes when someone can have a different, more amusing take on a grave situation. Here’s some of what Salt Lake Tribune’s Robert Kirby had to say on medical malpractice precautions:

True, serious medical mistakes do happen. I heard a rumor that a New York doctor accidentally left a barbecue grill inside a patient. Another doctor transplanted a viable liver into the wrong patient’s head.

Malpractice lawsuits have forced doctors to take unusual measures. Before my wife was wheeled into the operating room at the surgical center, she was given a Magic Marker and told to mark the location of her chemo port with an X.

This seemed rather pointless given that the port was clearly poking out of her chest like a knob on a Japanese stereo. Hell, I could see it, and I failed Boy Scout first aid. On another gurney, a patient waiting to have his knee scoped was asked to write "yes" on the appropriate knee. If anyone there was having a colonoscopy, I’ll bet that was interesting.

Maybe this sort of patient participation cuts down on surgical mistakes. Maybe it just reduces doctors’ liability. I asked the medical staff. They said it was just one more way of making sure everything went according to plan. When I asked if I came back for a vasectomy would I have to draw a smiley face on each of my ovaries, they told me to have a seat in the waiting room.

If you are in need of a mammogram, chances are that you may have to wait quite a while to have one. A shortage of radiologists has lead to long wait times for women needing a routine mammogram, sometimes up to a year’s wait. Why so long?

Most radiologists don’t choose mammography as a subspecialty for a number of reasons — the repetitive nature of the job, narrow focus, the stress of missing a diagnosis — but two are cited most often: money loss and malpractice.

"Missed or delayed diagnosis of breast cancer remains the leading cause of medical malpractice litigation in the nation today, while at the same time reimbursement for mammographic examinations remains embarrassingly low,"  explains Dr. Leonard Berlin, chairman of the department of radiology at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Ill., and Rush Medical College in Chicago.