New York Medical Malpractice

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.

Can being nice save malpractice? The tgllaw.com blog raises some interesting questions that stem from an article in the New York Times. Both pieces are worth a read, but this is what tgllaw.com had to say:

Can you put a dollar value on being nice? In essence that is the question posed by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals in their “sentinel event alert” which warns hospital personnel against “all contumelious and sarcastic remarks”. Bad behavior amongst doctors and nurses towards their patients is causing quite a stir, and some claim that it is even the reason behind some medical malpractice suits. The Joint Commission has set out to create a code of conduct which will require medical facilities to adhere to certain mandates.

But is just “playing nice” enough? Or are their deeper flaws in the medical system that cause some malpractice issues to arise?

ABC is currently running a six part series entitled “Hopkins”, where doctors at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore are profiled showing their everyday lives as caregivers and major life and death decisions they have to make on the fly. In this video clip, we see a doctor make his first mistake on the job, and the consequences he has to face regarding his patient’s care in the aftermath. Do you think this qualifies as malpractice?

Newsweek highlights the issues plaguing the psychiatric hospital system that lead to the death of Brooklyn resident Esmin Green.  According to the article, poor handling of patients and extreme wait times were not uncommon in what is known as the G Building at Kings County Hospital, including the falsifying of documents to hide massive overcrowding issues.

On June 18, as Green waited for help, the American College of Emergency Physicians released a nationwide survey of emergency-room directors. More than 80 percent of them said psychiatric patients should be placed in dedicated emergency psychiatric facilities, like the ones New York established in the late 1980s. The G Building at Kings County, where Green died, was the city’s largest such facility. But if her story tells us anything, it’s that isolating psychiatric patients from everyone else will not solve the problem. In New York, at least, this approach seems only to have fostered an environment conducive to abuse and neglect.

The incident involving Ms. Green has resulted in immediate reform at Kings County Hospital, but is it enough to make the necessary changes in similar facilities around the country?

Outbursts and other forms of verbal abuse from doctors towards other employees of hospitals is becoming a big problem, especially as it relates to medial malpractice cases. The Joint Commission, which is a national hospital accrediting agency, now claims that evidence of such behavior is pointing to more and more medical errors.

Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission, said growing emphasis on preventing medical errors has made it clear that a culture of intimidation contributes to the mistakes.

"It’s a problem that goes underreported, threatens patient safety and has become so ingrained in health care that it’s rarely talked about," Chassin told reporters Wednesday.

While intimidation only seems to occur in four to six percent of doctors and other hospital staff, that is a huge percentage when it comes to life and death issues. Modifying a system that pertains to strict violations against those who intimidate could go a long way into giving patients better care and prevent medical malpractice issues.

In a recent report released by New York state Department of Health, it was found that New Yorkers who underwent surgery in the state developed infections at a larger rate than the rest of the country. The study found the percentage to be an overwhelming 37% more infections than any other state.

"The only acceptable infection rate is zero, so hospitals that settle for being below average are dangerous places to be," the founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, Betsy McCaughey, said.

State health officials said they could not explain the disparity between infection rates in New York and the rest of the country. But they said in New York City, the rate of central line-associated infections was lower than the rate in upstate hospitals, and they said that upstate infection rates drove the statewide average higher.

Infections can always lead to a much more serious issue, including death, which is unacceptable for something that could easily be prevented.

Gardiner Harris in the New York Times specifically reports:

Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.

The case against these corrupting practices is convincing:

Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.

So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.

“Such forms of industry involvement tend to establish reciprocal relationships that can inject bias, distort decision-making and create the perception among colleagues, students, trainees and the public that practitioners are being ‘bought’ or ‘bribed’ by industry,” the report said.

The drug companies like, Merck “Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and Medtronic” have empty claims to the contrary:

They were wrong.

In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that medical schools should “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus,” in which doctors are paid to promote drug and device benefits.

More ethical guidelines and transparency in this area which is in great need of reform. I firmly believe that more open discussion about such issues would help improve the medical community and our national welfare.