Cleveland, Ohio Medical Malpractice Blog

A jury in Philadelphia recently awarded a mother $78.5 million after faulty diagnostic procedures at a local hospital left her son suffering from cerebral palsy.

In August 2008, 34-year-old Victoria Upsey arrived at the hospital with symptoms of complications that indicated her unborn son was being deprived of oxygen. A physician at the hospital examined her and determined that her baby had already died. After a second ultrasound, however, doctors detected a fetal heartbeat and performed an emergency caesarian section. At trial, experts testified that Upsey's son would likely have avoided injury if doctors had immediately initiated delivery.

It may seem unlikely, but simple injuries can lead to severe, life-threatening conditions. Physicians - particularly those who specialize in emergency medicine - are trained to recognize and address situations that could lead to bigger problems. Unfortunately, medical professionals make mistakes and, when they do, these mistakes can lead to claims for emergency room negligence.

Small Injury, Big Problems

A hospital in Saint Louis, Missouri is currently battling allegations that its emergency room physicians improperly treated a homeless woman who came to the hospital seeking treatment for a sprained ankle in September of last year. 29-year-old Anna Brown had visited three other emergency rooms complaining of leg pain in the days leading up to her death. When she finally visited the emergency room at St. Mary's Health Center, the pain was unbearable. Physicians performed several tests on Brown and insisted that she had a simple sprained ankle. Brown refused to leave the emergency room without further treatment and the hospital had her arrested. She later died in a jail cell.

A jury in California recently found a hospital responsible after an unnecessary procedure left a woman paralyzed. The victim received a record $22 million medical malpractice award.

Robyn Frankel went to the hospital on October 20, 2006 for an angiogram. She had long suffered from migraine headaches and doctors believed that an abnormality in the veins of her brain were responsible. When doctors injected Frankel with dye for the angiogram, she suffered a vasospasm and fell into a coma. When she awoke weeks later, she was paralyzed. Frankel is now confined to a wheelchair and requires around-the-clock nursing care.

Though the award is likely to be reduced, it will likely remain substantial. The jury awarded Frankel $16 million for past and future economic losses and $6 million for pain and suffering. California law requires that the pain and suffering portion of the award be reduced to $250,000.

When people are seriously ill, they seek treatment at a hospital to get well. Although physicians and other hospital staff are capable of amazing things, they are equally capable of making simple mistakes. Unfortunately, when a doctor makes a simple medical error, the consequences can be life threatening.

According to the seminal 1999 study, "To Err Is Human," as many as 100,000 Americans die each year due to preventable medical mistakes. What is worse, more recent studies indicate that this may only be the tip of the ice burg: in January of this year, a report on Medicare patients found that hospital staff did not report 86 percent of harms done to patients. As the study pointed out, if hospitals cannot track medical mistakes accurately, there is little hope that they can prevent them effectively.

A hospital in Illinois has settled for $8.3 million with the family of an infant boy who died after he was given too much sodium through an intravenous tube. The boy, who was born four months prematurely, was only about 40 days old when he died in 2010.

A hospital investigation determined that the dosage of sodium for the IV bag that killed the child had been incorrectly entered into the machine that mixed the solution. A simple data entry error caused a child to die far before his time.

Unfortunately, these sorts of medication errors are not uncommon. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), adverse drug events - injuries stemming from the use of medications - account for approximately 700,000 visits to hospital emergency rooms each year. Sadly, many of these sorts of accidents are preventable.

Expecting mothers depend on hospital staff to ensure that their babies are born happy and healthy. Unfortunately, physicians, nurses and other staff make mistakes and those mistakes can cause serious birth injuries.

Three years ago, 37-year-old Sarah Hutchins gave birth to her son, Blake. Sarah was 37 weeks pregnant when she became concerned that her baby had stopped moving and that something was wrong. Upon examination, a doctor discovered that the baby was, indeed, in distress and recommended that labor be induced. Unfortunately, hospital staff did not act quickly enough and Blake's brain was denied oxygen. Today, Blake suffers from severe developmental problems, including reduced cognitive capacity.

A recently published study by Dutch researchers indicates that population-based mammography programs lead to earlier cancer diagnoses and save lives. Indeed, despite arguments against mammography programs, researchers believe they are key to avoiding delayed breast cancer diagnoses and misdiagnoses.

Critics of breast cancer screening programs argue that they subject many patients to unnecessary testing, over treatment and worry, all for little effect: modern treatments for breast cancer are so effective that the chances of surviving it are as high as if the condition were detected early in a screening program. Dutch researchers discovered, however, that screening patients for breast cancer every two years reduced deaths significantly: when combined with adjuvant therapy - usually chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, radiation therapy, or drug therapy - screening programs reduced the incidence of death from breast cancer by 27.4 percent.

When a patient is at his most vulnerable, the skilled hands of a surgeon can mean the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, surgeons can make mistakes. Indeed, surgical errors are much more common than many people believe: according to a study recently published in the Archives of Surgery, between five and 10 surgical errors occur each day in the United States, some with devastating effects.

What is worse, many surgical errors are simply a result of inattention. For example, during a complicated operation, it is easy to lose count of the number of sponges a surgeon has used, a simple error that can cause a surgical team to leave foreign objects inside a patient.