In September of 2017, famed tennis star Serena Williams experienced shortness of breath during her recovery from the C-section delivery of her daughter, Alexa (1). Because she had a history of blood clots, she assumed it was a pulmonary embolism, and chased down a nurse to ask for a CT scan and IV heparin. The…
USA today recently released the results of an investigation into some pretty questionable hiring practices by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital system. The VA has knowingly hired multiple clinicians with extremely problematic employment histories. One example is neurosurgeon John Harry Schneider, who was hired despite over a dozen malpractice suits against him –…
A Patient’s Bill of Rights is a document that provides patients with information on how they can reasonably expect to be treated during the course of their hospital stay. These documents are, in almost all cases, not legally-binding. They simply provide goals and expectations for patient treatment. The Patient’s Bills of Rights was recently renamed the Patient…
Brain cooling is a procedure that treats hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), which is a neonatal brain injury often caused by medical mistakes. Medical mistakes are a patient safety problem – they often can be prevented, but when proper care is not provided, patients are harmed. It is the duty of medical practitioners to prevent errors from occurring – if…
According to the Journal of Patient Safety, preventable medical errors cause at least 210,000 deaths per year. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease and cancer. Unfortunately, mistakes made in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) represent a significant part of those numbers. The Archives of Disease in…
Hospital errors increase on holidays, weekends, at night & in July.
Government stopped reporting life-threatening physician mistakes.
Some labor & delivery units are far more dangerous than others, according to a recent study.
A prolonged or stalled labor is associated with complications in the baby, such as hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) and cerebral palsy.
