Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog

All too often the public does not hear about the detrimental effects tort reform has on the hundreds of thousands of victims whom are injured by medical malpractice each year. Tort reform puts a cap on compensation for victims of medical negligence. The Huffington Post points out the specific case of Lisa Gurley. A court found that the severe brain injury suffered at birth by Lisa’s son, Colin, was caused by a doctor’s negligence. Despite this finding, Nebraska tort reform prevented Lisa and her son from being adequately compensated for his injuries. In fact, they were compensated for just a tiny fraction of what it will cost to care for Colin for the remainder of his life. Now, Medicaid and the Nebraska Medically Handicap Children's program pay for all of Colin’s care. It is grossly unfair that the taxpayers and Colin’s family are paying the astronomical cost of caring for a severely handicapped child while the doctor and the insurance company paid minimally for the medical negligence. The Chicago medical malpractice attorneys at Levin and Perconti are working to protect the rights of catastrophically injured children like Colin and to ensure that there continue to be adequate remedies for injured victims of medical negligence.

A man who developed an infection after donating blood at a hospital has filed a medical malpractice lawsuit. In the past 10 years, the 43 year old had regularly donated his O-positive type blood for free at the blood center. However, in April 2009 he came down with a debilitating infection. When he could no longer afford the hospital expenses anymore, he was denied care. The man filed a medical malpractice lawsuit alleging that they took his blood and backed out of a promise to take care of him if anything happened to him by virtue of his donations. The medical malpractice furthermore accuses the hospital of being unjustly enriched by taking his blood under false pretenses and selling it. The director of communications for the hospital stated that there is a possibility that donors may get infections from sources unrelated to a blood donation. To look further into the allegations, please click the link.

Patients are contending that a hospital is liable for deaths after Hurricane Katrina because the hospital failed to adequately prepare for the disaster. This is the first trial that accuses a health-care institution of general negligence. Medical malpractice lawyers for the family hope to convince the jury that executives at the hospital were aware that generators were inadequate and deliberately put off costly emergency preparedness improvements. A 73-year-old victim wrongfully died after generators at the hospital failed. The fact that the case is labeled a negligence trial greatly affects the damages because Louisiana caps medical malpractice awards at $500,000 but does not impose caps in negligence trials. Hospitals must be ready for emergencies in order to avoid medical error. To read about the upcoming trial, please check out the link.

The daughter of a woman who died last year has filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against a hospital claiming that hospital negligence caused her mother’s wrongful death. The medical malpractice lawsuit claims that the county “carelessly and negligently managed the care of” the victim which caused her wrongful death. The woman was checked into hospital exhibiting suicidal behavior. The woman was not checked for approximately 90 minutes when she was found slouched over without a pulse and not breathing. The medical malpractice lawsuit claims that the daughter was deprived of a kind and loving mother. To read more about the medical malpractice lawsuit, please click the link.

On Friday, December 18, a 44-year-old woman from Cerro Gordo, IL died after falling from a seventh floor window at Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana. An autopsy revealed that her death was a result of multiple injuries sustained in the fall. The article reports that the victim jumped from the window and landed on a roof five stories below. However, the article does not indicate if the victim was a patient, what led her to fall from the window, or if this was an incident of medical negligence. Read more about this Urbana hospital death.

In a case similar in nature, the medical malpractice attorneys of Levin & Perconti recently won a $1 million jury for the family of a nursing home resident who exited from a window at a Chicago area nursing home and fell to his death. The Cook County jury found the nursing home negligent in failing to prevent the resident from exiting through the window. To read about this jury verdict, follow the link.

Patrick Malone wrote an article for the Huffington Post discussing the lack of accountability of doctors in medical malpractice. In the medical industry, a doctor will lose his or her license for only flagrant patterns of drug or alcohol abuse or other criminal behavior. The health care’s big safety emphasis in recent years has been to create a “no blame” culture that encourages reporting of medical errors and injuries by promises of confidentiality and non-punitive action. This idea was implemented so that medical errors can be corrected by implementing “systems” changes, such as checklists to make sure all appropriate steps are taken to prevent infections. Yet this system also allows physicians who repeatedly put their patients in jeopardy to ignore the rules. This occurs often when surgeons don’t follow the now routine practice of “signing the site” to prevent wrong-site surgery. This explains why an estimated 4,000 wrong-site surgeries are still performed every year in the United States. Some medical safety leaders are starting to call for accountability for rules violations. They stated that “every safe industry has transgressions that are firing offenses.” They proposed a short list of offenses in the hospital that call for suspension of a doctor’s practice for a limited time such as: failing to perform hand hygiene, skipping the sign-over to a new provider at the end of a shift, not marking the surgical site, and failing to use a checklist at the start of surgery to make sure everyone in the operating room knows the special needs of the patient. To read more about doctor accountability, please click the link.

Blake Fought was about to be released from the hospital after recovering from an illness that required a central line IV. Unfortunately, the nurse had never been trained to remove the IV and did not follow proper procedures. This caused bubbles to enter the young man’s brain, heart and blood vessels. He died in front of the nurses and his own parents as a result of the medical malpractice. Blake is just one of the 98,000 patients who are killed by medical error each year. Please visit 98,000 reasons to learn more about those killed by medical error. To read Blake’s story, please click the link.

Two brain surgeons at a hospital face charges for failure to complete a brain surgery. The department of health has documented the hospital for 14 different medical abuses including when two brain surgeons failed to perform an operation of a patient that was already sedated on the table for operation. A patient was scheduled to undergo the second portion of her two-part brain surgery and her doctor failed to show due to being out of town. The chief of neurosurgery declined to finish the surgery the absent doctor. The hospital has been given an October deadline for the hospital to present the state with a plan to correct the serious communication error from happening. They also must pay the fines that the department of health has imposed on him. The hospital will be fined for allowing the doctors operating to not pause to stop and check that they were operating on the right part of the body. Also, a patient was sedated before the brain surgeon was present, and an orthopedic surgeon left the operation after doing his part before the next surgeon was present. This type of medical malpractice highlights the need for effective communication at hospitals. To read more about the medical error, please click the link.

A hospital was ordered to pay $8 million in a wrongful death lawsuit that was filed by a patient’s widow. The widow claims that his wife visited the hospital three times. On the first occasion, the hospital found that she had minor intestinal blockage. She ended up passing away. Her widow contacted a medical malpractice attorney who took his case. The attorney found that the widow had died of gangrene caused by a perforation in the bowel. The doctor who examined the widow was not found liable by the jury but was found negligent with the medical review board. The board found the doctor “failed to comply with the appropriate standard of care.”

Read more about the failed medical care here.

After finding staph infections in five of its patients in a two month period, the hospital decided to test all operating room staff members. The hospital found that 15 staff members were in fact carrying the common staph bacteria. However, the hospital is not claiming responsibility for the infected patients. They claim that the patients could have become infected through improper home care. All of the infections were non-life threatening. The infected staff members were not allowed to participate in surgeries for a period of a week up to 11 days. Hospital negligence can lead to infections so one may want to contact a medical malpractice attorney for further legal action.

Read more about the hospital infections here.

A series of hospitals have been fined for serious medical violations, according to an article. Some of these medical violations led to either serious bodily harm or even death. At one particular hospital, a child suffered serious brain injury after the nursing staff failed to drain his head properly. Another hospital has claimed to counteract medical violations they will hire more staff and cut back on medical technicians’ duties so they can better concentrate on the patient’s care. If you have suffered due to a medical violation at your hospital you should consult a medical malpractice attorney to discuss legal options.

Read more about the serious fines dealt to the hospitals here.

A woman went to a hospital expecting a normal vaginal delivery. However after 10 hours of labor she needed a cesarean section and began bleeding internally after her uterine arteries were torn or cut during the surgery. According to her medical malpractice lawsuit she bled to death after the attending physician and obstetrician argued as to how to treat her. They could not determine whether the victim was bleeding internally and whether they should reopen her abdominal incision to evaluate. The victim had lost more than 3 quarts of blood during the surgery which accounted for 60 percent of the total blood volume in her body. The medical malpractice lawsuit claims that the doctors and hospital botched what should have been done in a routine birth. When the victim entered the hospital she was healthy and had a problem-free, full-term pregnancy. The doctor’s were quoted in an affidavit stating that there was understaffing in the surgical care unit. Both the hospital and doctors deny any medical malpractice. To read more about the mother’s death, please click the link.

A recent investigation by the Hearst Company has drawn attention to the fact that approximately 200 thousand Americans will die this year from preventable medical errors and hospital infections. Currently 20 states have no medical error reporting system in place, five have voluntary ones and five more are developing reporting systems. Even in the 20 states that have the mandatory systems, hospitals report only a tiny percentage of their mistakes, standards vary wildly and enforcement is often nonexistent. The report also blames special interests for blocking progress in the area of medical reporting. A news medical correspondent described some of the most common medical miscues and offered advice to help keep one from being a victim of medical malpractice.

- Make sure surgeons personally sign or initial the skin of the patient over the area that’s being operated on; patients should remind all surgical personnel about the side and site of the procedure
- Patient’s should ask what every single medication is that they’re given while in the hospital and remind everyone who approaches them with drugs of any allergies they have
- Always look the surgeon in the eye before the operation to avoid any possibility of mistaken identity.

Communication is the greatest key to preventing medical errors which are oftentimes caused by
- Poor documentation
- Illegible handwriting
- Sleep deprivation
- Improper nurse to patient ratios

To read more about the medical mistake survey, please click the link.

A hospital will be defending itself in a hospital negligence medical malpractice lawsuit beginning today, claims an article. The hospital was warned that one of their surgeons was a “danger to patients” but allowed the surgeon to continue performing surgeries. One of the surgeon’s last surgeries resulted in a woman’s death. The woman’s personal physician had written to the hospital explicitly stating that this young surgeon was a threat. The woman’s estate has already settled with the surgeon for medical malpractice. The surgeon was later captured for robbing a bank and was sentenced to 51 months in prison.

Read more about the hospital negligence action here.

A recent New York Times Op-Ed calls on hospitals to provide clinical training to medical students in geriatric care in order to deliver proper medical treatments to older patients. Currently, medical students receive clinical training in ob-gyn and pediatrics but most physicians never treat children or deliver babies. There are no requirements for medical students to receive clinical training in geriatrics even though people over 65 make up a large number of medical and surgical patients in our hospitals. Older patients do not always have the same symptoms or react to treatments like younger patients do. Because of this, the risk for incidents of medical malpractice may arise because medical students do not understand how to treat older patients.

Recently, there has been a push by several organizations to require geriatrics training. This training would include training in nursing homes. These new measures could increase clinical knowledge and help reduce medical negligence in hospitals coast-to-coast. Follow the link to read more about the proposed list of geriatric competencies in Academic Medicine, the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

A medical center was fined $25,000.00 for medical negligence when it allowed a patient to fall off an x-ray table which resulted in blinding of one of the patient’s eyes. Although the medical center had warning that the woman appeared confused and disoriented with a high risk of falling, she was not supervised during her x-ray procedure. The woman’s eyeball was ruptured after falling to the floor. The woman has yet to file a medical malpractice lawsuit against the center.

Read more about the medical negligence here.

A man alleges a hospital was negligent when it allowed his wife to bring a gun into a locked facility and kill herself. The woman belonged to the mental health unit and was out on visitation when she obtained the gun. The man brings a wrongful death suit against the hospital for their alleged negligence in failing to search his wife after re-entering the facility.

Read more about the medical malpractice suit here.

According to ABC 7, a medical malpractice settlement over a woman who died in a hospital waiting room has finally been reached for $2 million. The woman’s family filed a wrongful death suit against the city hospital. The woman, a psychiatric patient, had been in the waiting for 24 hours, eventually landing on the floor struggling to get up. The entire ordeal was caught on video camera showing security guards and staff looking into the waiting room but not helping the woman. Six hospital employees lost their jobs over the incident, the article claims. The medical malpractice case has invoked public outrage.

Read more about the medical malpractice settlement here.

A man died from a bowel obstruction after a hospital sent him home days earlier when he reported abdominal pain. The family claims the hospital was negligent and thus decided to file a medical malpractice claim against the hospital. X-rays show that the emergency room doctor failed to recognize a bowel obstruction in the man’s stomach, according to the deceased’s family.

Read more about the hospital malpractice here.

A jury awarded a man’s widow after deciding that a man had died due to medical malpractice. A hospital failed to read a man’s x-ray which would have allegedly prevented him from having an aortic aneurysm. The widow won $2.185 million for the medical malpractice. Protocol at the hospital was for the emergency room physician to review the x-rays before sending them to a radiologist. According to the complaint, this never happened which led to medical malpractice.

Read more about the medical malpractice case here.