Hospital Negligence

Hospitals should be the safest of our institutions, and we expect that we can count on certain levels of care when we enter a hospital for either a routine procedure or an emergency treatment. However, thousands of patients are injured every year as a result of hospital negligence, and the complications (short-term and long-term) caused by such error can be serious.

Hospital negligence is defined as the failure of hospital staff to provide the accepted standard of care, resulting in a patient’s injury or illness. Hospital staff can include nurses, medical technicians or other support professionals, as well as physicians. Some malpractice claims that result from treatment in a hospital may involve the physician directly, while others may take action against the hospital separate from any action against an individual doctor. The circumstances of your injury would determine who was deemed liable for the harm you suffered.

Thousands of patients are harmed every year by preventable errors at hospitals. The complications caused by those errors can be deadly. Consider these statistics:

• At least 44,000 and perhaps as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year as a result of preventable medical errors, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine has estimated.
• More than 4,800 incidents involving preventable deaths, serious injuries or risk of those were reported to The Joint Commission on Healthcare Facility Accreditation from 2000 to 2008.
• The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that patients contract at least 2 million hospital-acquired infections each year, leading to approximately 90,000 deaths.
• Medication errors harm 1.5 million people each year, including 400,000 in hospitals, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine.
• One-fifth of hospitals fail to conduct time-outs before surgery, a step in the surgical process known to be effective in preventing the occurrence of wrong-site surgery.
• Hospitals are the most common institutional health care providers named in medical malpractice lawsuits, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet, the percentage of medical malpractice claims involving hospitals may be underestimated, since hospitals typically self-insure and are not required to report closed-claim information to state insurance regulators.
• Most preventable medical malpractice injuries reported in insurance claims occur at hospitals.

Hospital negligence happens in numerous ways, including surgery on the wrong body part. According to a 2007 article in the Annals of Surgery, “a devastating outcome of a wrong-site surgery” might be expected once a year in a 300-bed hospital. The problem is widespread enough that the federal Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations published a universal protocol aimed at preventing wrong-site, wrong-person and wrong-procedure surgeries. The protocol includes a “time-out” process immediately before the surgery. However, 20 percent of hospitals do not follow this protocol.

Other common instances of hospital negligence include:

• Diagnostic errors: Thousands of hospitalized patients die every year due to diagnostic errors. They account for 17 percent of preventable errors in hospitalized patients, according to a landmark study by Harvard Medical School. Missed or delayed diagnoses such as cancer diagnoses are a prominent reason for malpractice claims. Poor teamwork and communication between health care providers are contributing factors to diagnostic errors in both emergency and operating rooms.
• Surgical errors: Wrong-site surgery was the most common serious error reported in 2007 and 2008, with more than 100 instances recorded each year. Simply defined, wrong site surgery is an invasive medical procedure on the wrong location of the body. Examples of wrong site surgery include injection of local anesthesia to the wrong site, surgery on the wrong arm, knee or shoulder or surgery at the wrong spinal level. Wrong site surgery may also include surgery on the wrong patient. The root causes are incomplete or inaccurate communication among surgical team members and failure to involve the patient or the patient’s family in identifying and marking the correct surgical site. Many hospitals have instituted time-outs before surgery—a step shown to be effective in preventing wrong site surgery. But one-fifth of hospitals have not adopted this precautionary practice.
• Labor and delivery errors: Current trends suggest that maternal mortality rates may be increasing in the U.S. In the last 15 years, 84 cases of mothers dying within 42 days of birth or termination of pregnancy were reported, with the largest numbers in 2004, 2005 and 2006. According to a 2008 study by Hospital Corporation of America, the most common preventable errors are failure to control blood pressure in hypertensive women, failure to pay attention to vital signs following Caesarean section, hemorrhage after Caesarean section and failure to diagnose and treat pulmonary edema.
• Medication errors: Errors associated with medication are believed to be the most common type of medical error and a significant cause of preventable injuries and deaths. Some errors are caused by illegible or confusing handwritten abbreviations by doctors and the failure of health care providers to communicate with one another. Some are caused by drugs that have confusing sound-alike or look-alike names. Another cause of fatal errors is the stocking of hospital patient care units with full-strength drugs that can be toxic unless diluted.
• Anesthesia errors: An estimated 40 million anesthetics are administered each year, and anesthesiologists participate in 90 percent of them. Any mistake in the dose or type of anesthesia can have serious consequences.
• Tubing misconnection errors: Tubing and catheter misconnection errors are an underreported problem, according to The Joint Commission. The Commission reported nine instances of tubing misconnections resulting in eight deaths and one in permanent impairment. The cases involved seven adults and two infants. Reports to the Food and Drug Administration and the Institute For Safe Medication Practices suggest tubing misconnection errors occur frequently and lead to deadly consequences.
• Failure to respond to the patient: Hospital emergency rooms are the source of about half the preventable incidents involving patient deaths or serious injury due to delays in treatment. But serious problems can occur in any hospital unit, including intensive care units, ambulatory care services, operating rooms and in-home care settings. Of 55 cases of delays in treatment reported to The Joint Commission, 52 resulted in deaths.
• Failure to monitor patients after discharge directions: One widely cited study found that nearly 20 percent of patients experience adverse events within three weeks of discharge, nearly three quarters of which could have been prevented with improved patient monitoring. Adverse drug events are the most common post-discharge complication, with hospital-acquired infections and complications from surgical procedures also causing a significant number of deaths.

If you have concerns about your hospital care, please contact Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard P.C. for a free, no-obligation consultation at 877.420.1269. Please keep in mind that there are strict deadlines for filing medical malpractice actions. The statute of limitations may be running on your claim, so time is of the essence. A medical malpractice attorney with experience in hospital negligence claims can help evaluate the circumstances of your injury or illness. A lawyer will work with accredited medical experts to evaluate whether healthcare standards were met and provide you with your legal options.