Dead by Mistake, Hearst Newspapers’ groundbreaking investigative series on medical malpractice (that we blogged about earlier) was so ridiculously chockfull of important (and devastating) information that we’ve decided to spend some more time examining it. And because we’ve blogged before about California, with its 34-year-old “cap” on compensation for injured patients, which prevents severe cases of malpractice from going forward in the courts, on top of a weak doctor disciplinary system, we thought we’d start there.
According to the Heast invesigative report, up until 2007, California had “no hard deadlines for reporting or investigating hospital errors. As a result, hospitals often delayed reporting egregious mistakes for months, and many errors were never investigated at all.” But even with the 2007 laws, which impose fines on hospitals that that fail to report medical errors, so far, no fines have been issued—and state records indicate that 14 of the state’s 58 counties have yet to report any errors at all.
Meanwhile, Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose), who sponsored the recent legislation, said hospital deaths in her district made her sensitive to the “chronic problem” of medical errors throughout her state.
“People are dying when they shouldn't be dying,” said Alquist. “The wrong limb is cut off. Patients are administered the wrong medications, or they're given a huge overdose, or—and it's really spooky—people stay awake during surgery” (because their anesthesia wasn’t administered correctly).
The report goes on to chronicle the tragic story of 70-year-old Diane Stewart who died after she developed a bowel obstruction following routine knee surgery. Despite her family’s pleas to see their doctor as Stewart’s condition rapidly grew worse, she was not examined until the following morning when she went into shock and died.
In a frightening bit of commentary about the state of California hospitals, the facility where all of this unfolded was Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto—which is widely “regarded as one of the best hospitals on the West Coast.” Even scarier, “[i]n 2008, investigators from the state Department of Public Health found that ‘relevant’ portions of Diane Stewart's computer file had been deleted after her death and that a supervisor instructed a nurse to make postmortem ‘late entries’ to describe her care.” The Health Department also found “Stanford Hospital had ‘failed to permanently record relevant information’ about the patient, as required by state law.”
Depsite the law that caps compensation in the state, Stewart’s family has filed a lawsuit against Stanford Hospital (though incentivising the facility to avoid similar mishaps may be an uphill battle, given California’s lowball “caps”). Meanwhile, Stanford, for its part, has denied any wrongdoing.
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