Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

It’s long been known that medical mistakes lead to serious harm, resulting in terrible injuries and even death to unsuspecting patients. Though families might expect harm to occur due to unexpected health emergencies, it’s often hard to accept that a family member was harmed at the hands of trained medical professionals, the very people entrusted to help. Just how bad the problem was has been difficult to ascertain, though researchers at Johns Hopkins say they think they might have some idea.

According to a recently published study by experts at Johns Hopkins School Medicine, medical errors deserve to be deemed the third leading cause of death for those living in the United States. If that’s true, then that places medical errors behind only heart disease and cancer as the biggest killers of Americans. Both heart disease and cancer are responsible for taking the lives of about 600,000 people each and every year. Researchers estimate that medical errors were responsible for killing 250,000 people each year. The fourth leading cause of death (formerly third) is respiratory disease, which kills more than 150,000 people each year.

Though all deaths are tragic, what makes medical errors different than cancer, heart disease or respiratory illness is that medical errors are preventable. Cancer, despite its horror, is no one’s fault. The same cannot be said for medical mistakes. Medical errors are by their very nature the result of someone’s ignorance, carelessness or negligence. If nurses, doctors and hospitals were more rigorous about tackling these problems, by providing training, insisting on accountability and becoming better listeners, then potentially hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each and every year.

Hospitals have done a lot in recent years to curb the thousands of unnecessary deaths and injuries that take place in medical facilities each year. Hand-washing campaigns and fancy germ fighting equipment have been used to try and prevent some of the avoidable medical complications that occur each year. One troubling detail that has recently been brought to light is how lucrative such complications can be to a hospital’s bottom line.

In a very grim report, researchers from Harvard Medical School published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that surgical complications from infections and procedure-related strokes were typically twice as lucrative as operations that went smoothly.

The study was meant to highlight how it might be difficult to continue to push for safety reforms in the medical industry when hospitals have a vested financial interest not to do so. The study focused on 34,000 surgeries performed at Texas Health, a large hospital network in Dallas.

The CDC recently warned about the potentially deadly new superbug that poses special problems for hospitals and nursing homes in Mississippi. The bacteria, known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), cannot be killed by most antibiotics.

The worry among health providers is that CRE poses a special threat to patients across the country because, in addition to its antibiotic resistance, the bacteria is incredibly deadly, with an unusually high mortality rate. The final factor that makes CRE so troubling to doctors is that the bacteria has a habit of spreading its antibiotic resistance to other bacteria, like E. coli. This could make treating other common illnesses much more difficult.

CRE is part of a very common and generally harmless family of bacteria that live in the stomach. However, CRE can cause extremely serious problems for those that develop CRE infections of the bloodstream. In fact, CRE death rates are estimated at between 38 and 44 percent, a significantly higher level than is typically seen in similar infections.