When we told you the other day about attorney Pat Malone’s new book aimed at protecting patients from the “pandemic” of preventable medical errors, we did so knowing Malone’s choice of words was not only supported by mountains of empirical evidence, but by a terrible wealth of real life, healthcare horror stories (here, here, here). Well, unfortunately, in the last week or so, those horror stories have kept on coming.
For starters, there’s a terrible tale out of Florida involving a 90-year-old man who twice had dental tools dropped down his throat, which ultimately led to his death. State officials found the dentist’s actions to have been negligent and fined him $17,000.
Meanwhile the Flint Journal published a special report which found “100 area health professionals, including doctors and nurses, have been disciplined by state regulators since 2006.” One of the more notable “lowlights” included a doctor who DEA officials discovered had a Vicodin stash “hidden above ceiling tiles,” (along with 100 loose tablets in his pants pocket). The doctor admitted to “taking as many as 30 Vicodin daily.”
Then there’s an item out of Denver, CO involving a woman who was scheduled to have a “shunt valve in her brain replaced,” and wound up dead after a series of preventable mishaps including having Demerol “administered incorrectly, with the wrong dose and wrong route,” and a crash cart that hospital personnel were “unfamiliar with,” resulting in a situation state health inspectors described as “chaotic.” The state health department has since taken the “highly unusual step” of “ordering the hospital…to stop accepting patients except in emergencies.”
All of this is to say, as the nation continues to debate “healthcare reform,” and politicians wrestle over what to compromise along the way, let’s hope they’re aware that these kinds of stories continue to appear all too frequently, and that maintaining patients’ access to the courts helps ensure better (and safer) care for all of us.
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