Injury: Hypoxic brain injury from anesthesia for a 6 year old girl in a Pediatric Hospital Age of Patient at Injury: 6 years of age Result: $7 Million Settlement Court: Philadelphia County, PA Comments: Heart breaking case of injury following anesthesia for a cardiac procedure at a Pediatric Hospital. The young child sustained life-altering brain [...]
Sources: NPR (National Public Radio); US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) WE'VE blogged about MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), VRE (cancomycin Resistant Enterococcus) and C-Diff (Clostridium difficile). Get ready to add another nasty super bug to the list -CRE (carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae). Federal officials warn that the newest kid on the block has become a significant health problem [...]
Sources: Bloomberg News, US Food & Drug Administration THEY have been hailed as the latest state of the art technology and their manufacturer has given them a name worthy of a medical rennaissance -the Da Vinci. But are robotic surgeries actually safer than those performed directly by the hand of a surgeon? Robot systems (da [...]
Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Jemal A, et al., Cancer statistics, 2009. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 2009;59(4):225–249; U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Cancer Institute; 2009. CANCER is the second most common cause of death among children between [...]
Sources: Cancer, Vol. 119, Issue 3, Page 473, 1 February 2013; Haque R., et al. Impact of breast cancer subtypes on treatment and survival. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev.. 2012; 21: 1848-1855. ALARMING results from a Kaiser Permanente (the largest HMO in the US) study, 21 years in the making, suggest that even the most common and least aggressive subtype of [...]
Sources: Surgery, December, 18, 2012; MedScape Surgical Malpractice is more common than we think. More than 4000 surgical "never events" occurred each year between 1990 and 2010 in the United States, according to the findings of a retrospective study of national malpractice data. Winta T. Mehtsun, MD, MPH, from the Johns Hopkins University School of [...]
Sources: Archives of Surgery 2010;145:978-984; MedScape Hospitals continue to experience wrong-site and wrong-patient surgeries, which are more common than the medical community might care to admit. Investigators have found that clinicians in both surgical and nonsurgical disciplines share equal responsibility for the unacceptable errors. Dr. Stahel and colleagues in Colorado and at the Geisinger Medical Center in [...]
Sources: Medical News Today; Thomas Jefferson University An inter-institutional team effort, initiated by Thomas Jefferson Unversity's Michael A. Augello of the Department of Cancer Biology at Thomas Jefferson University, has found a potential biomarker for determining who will get the metastatic (and lethal) form of prostate cancer, which is usually contained or containable if caught in [...]
Source: Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Volume 215, Issue 3 , Pages 322-330, September 2012 Hospital Malpractice Hospital Malpractice continues to be a problem. An article published recently in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons sheds some rare light on hospital care and legislation aimed at reimbursing Medicare and Medicaid for [...]
Sources: Kaiser Health News; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Is Hospital Malpractice a problem? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services thinks so. It wants hospitals to curb its patient re-admissions starting this fall, or pay the price, Kaiser Health News reported. CMS will hope to recoup about $280 million in payments from about 2,200 [...]