Petersburg Personal Injury Blog

I am a Virginia medical malpractice plaintiff’s attorney who represents persons injured through the negligence of doctors, hospitals, nurses, and other health care providers. Over the past eight months, as the health care reform debate has heated up, I have heard calls for “tort reform” from various legislators.

To hear them talk you would think that frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits are one of the primary reasons health care costs today are so high. They argue that if we just take away an injured person’s right to hold medical professionals accountable for their negligence, medical costs will go way down. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The costs of malpractice lawsuits represent only a miniscule part of health spending.

I have never quite understood how legislators have no trouble understanding why someone who runs a red light and causes an accident and serious injuries should be held accountable for his negligence, but, at the same time, believe that negligent health care providers should get a “free pass” when they injure or kill a person. Recently I was reminded of this conundrum when I read an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Catching Deadly Drug Mistakes.”

The article begins with the following paragraphs:

“A nurse misunderstands an abbreviation on a pharmacy order, and gives an accidental overdose of a drug that slows the heart rate, killing the patient. Intravenous fluids are administered after surgery at too-high a rate to a child, who then dies because of the error. Confusion over a drug name leads to insulin being added to infant nutrition IV solutions instead of the intended medication, heparin, an anti-clotting drug. The consequences are fatal.

Despite years of effort to make medications safer, mishaps like these still happen at an alarming rate. Medication errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States according to the Food and Drug Administration.”

The write-up illustrates that serious medical errors do occur and they sometimes cause catastrophic injuries and death. There is nothing “frivolous” about the incidents described above. The article also suggests that increased pressure on hospitals to reduce costs and staff in today’s economy may be contributing to a rise in medication mistakes.

What can you do to help protect yourself or your family members from a serious, perhaps fatal, drug mistake? The author of The Wall Street Journal article suggests the following:

• Ask hospital staff members and pharmacists to explain, in detail, what medications have been prescribed for you; then confirm the drugs are being administered in the proper dosages and according to the drug’s written instructions.
• When picking up medication at the pharmacy, review dosage instructions with your pharmacist. You may not know that “BID” means twice a day or “bt” means bedtime. If there is anything confusing to you about the name of the drug or why it was prescribed for you, ask the pharmacist. If he can’t help you, he can call your doctor’s office for clarification.
• Sign up for customized alerts regarding prescribed medications. Go to www.consumermedsafety.org for information about how to do this.
• Read the label on your prescription bottle carefully before you take a drug. Confusing “look-alike” drug names and packaging can lead to errors. Don’t make any assumptions about the identity of a drug based solely on the shape of the bottle or the container.

If and when you become the victim of a medication error, report the incident at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices’ website: consumermedsafety.org. You may also want to notify the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) of medication errors at www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch. Your notification may help keep others safe from a similar drug mistake.

Labels: Medical Malpractice

As a personal injury attorney, I sometimes find myself having to set the record straight. In addition to representing persons injured in car accidents, I also represent people injured because of the medical negligence of health care providers, including doctors and hospitals. I can assure you I only take cases I believe are meritorious. In fact, before I file suit, I always ask respected physicians and other medical experts to review the relevant medical records and render an opinion that my client’s injuries or death were caused by medical negligence.

Nevertheless, again and again I see articles and talk show chatter alleging that medical malpractice lawsuits are all frivolous. Nothing could be further from the truth, certainly in Virginia.

Much of it has to do with the economics of medical malpractice cases. I work on a contingent fee basis. This means that, like most plaintiffs’ attorneys, I only earn a legal fee if I recover money for my client. If I lose a malpractice case, I earn no legal fee which means I receive nothing in payment for the hundreds of hours I may have worked on a claim. What lawyer would want to take on this kind of risk on a frivolous case?

I believe it is also fair to say that insurance companies do not readily pay frivolous claims. They defend them vigorously, often using what plaintiffs’ attorneys refer to as “scorched earth” tactics to fight the case to the bitter end. The idea that insurance companies give up easily and pay plaintiffs large sums of money whenever a frivolous lawsuit is filed is ridiculous. The truth is that medical malpractice cases are among the hardest fought and most difficult for plaintiff’s attorneys to prosecute and win.

What are some of the facts you need to know?

• In Virginia, the state legislature has enacted a $2,000,000 cap on medical malpractice cases – no matter how catastrophically a person may have been injured, no matter how large his medical bills are, or how many health care providers he sues. Regardless of the facts of a case, the maximum dollar amount an injured victim can recover is $2,000,000.
• Medical errors do happen, and sometimes they cause serious injuries. A nurse may give a patient 80 units of insulin instead of 8 units because she couldn’t read the physician’s illegible handwriting on the prescription order. An x-ray may disclose a life threatening condition, but the radiologist who read the x-ray fails to notify the patient’s doctor who ordered it and that doctor, in turn, may fail to follow up with the radiologist for the x-ray results.
• In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a report titled “To Err is Human.” The report estimated that approximately 98,000 Americans die each year because of medical errors. That was ten years ago. This past May, the campaign director for the Safe Patient Project of Consumers Union, a person who had participated in the original IOM study, indicated there had been no improvement in these numbers over the past decade. CDC (Centers for Disease Control) data suggests that, today, more than 100,000 people die every year as a result of medical errors.
• A 2006 article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine said research “has established that the great majority of patients who sustain a medical injury as a result of negligence do not sue.” 80% of these few medical malpractice claims that are made do involve severe physical injuries. Only 3% involve claims where no “adverse outcome from medical care was evident.” In other words, very few patients who are the victims of medical malpractice ever bring a lawsuit against a health care provider. Of those very few who do, only 3% bring lawsuits that could be called frivolous.

So the next time you hear talk of frivolous malpractice lawsuits, remember that medical errors injure or kill thousands of people every year while frivolous lawsuits are few and far between.

Labels: Medical Malpractice