A recently released report by the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Science, indicates that while many of the patient safety initiatives undertaken here in the U.S. focus on issues like surgical errors, medication mistakes and other types of harm in hospital settings, there is at least one major medical danger that […]
Every year, millions of people around the world will fight an ultimately losing battle with sepsis. Indeed, statistics from the Mayo Clinic show that there are anywhere from 200,000 to three million cases of this condition here in the U.S. every year. While the unfortunate reality is that modern medicine has yet to devise a […]
Last week, our blog discussed how recent reports have outlined how two patients who underwent heart transplant procedures at UPMC Presbyterian hospital died last October and this past June after contracting a fungal infection in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. As shocking as this was, we also discussed how these same reports revealed that a […]
Over the last year, our blog has been closely following the patient safety threat posed by contaminated duodenoscopes, which are essentially specialized endoscopes placed down the throats of patients and used to treat a variety of digestive system disorders. To recap, the problem with duodenoscopes is their design is such that biological material can remain […]
Medical malpractice and wrongful death cases caused by hospital negligence can happen in all sorts of ways. Whether it is Legionnaire’s Disease believed to be caused by drinking water, or a serial infector like David Kwiatkowski who swaps out fentanyl with saline to get high, cases of negligence in the medical community are widespread. One […]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made headlines last November when it strongly urged surgeons not to use power morcellators in either hysterectomies or myomectomies, and decreed black-box warnings, the highest warning level issued by the agency, would henceforth be used on the devices. These rather definitive actions by the FDA came on the […]
The president’s stimulus has put taxpayers behind $30 billion in electronic medical records (EMR) expenses. The money in question and the technological disasters that were born out the EMR “upgrades” have many upset, and rightly so. But you shouldn’t expect to hear about these issues from doctors or the hospital administrators who employ them. This […]
If you make the life-altering decision to undergo a major operation, it goes without saying that you have complete trust in your surgeon. Indeed, you trust in their abilities, you trust in their medical knowledge, and you trust in their communicating all pertinent information. As such, when the unthinkable happens and you suffer significant — […]
The first stop for medical care for many of those brave men and women who served in our nation’s armed forces is one of the 150 medical centers or nearly 1,400 facilities that together comprise the Veterans Health Administration, the single largest integrated health care system in the nation. Indeed, the VA system provided care […]
Last time, we started discussing how a group of Canadian researchers recently published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine examining the impact of sleep deprivation on surgical performance and how its findings are contrary to those made in what is now considered a landmark 2009 study by American researchers. In today’s post, […]
