The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are warning healthcare professionals that sharing blood glucose monitoring machines carries the risk of transmitting the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and other infectious diseases. Their simple advice: One monitor per diabetic patient. In recent years, the number of reported HBV….
Continue ReadingArchives for December 2010
Error Rates in Medicine Continue High, but Lawsuits Are Down
The Center for Justice & Democracy has a new fact sheet on recently published studies on medical malpractice, hospital errors and preventable injuries. The depressing findings: * Preventable injuries continue at very high rates. This is according to recent studies from Medicare and from a big study published in the New England Journal of Medicine…..
Continue Reading“30-minute promise” for emergency visits makes Texas hospital popular with patients
Quick triage of patients who arrive at the Emergency Department isn’t just important for patient safety. It makes hospitals a lot more popular with their consumers, as one hospital has found. The emergency department at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Plano launched a policy called the 30-Minute Promise in October 2009, pledging to treat patients….
Continue ReadingVirginia cap on malpractice awards to increase starting in 2012
The cap on awards for malpractice lawsuits in Virginia will go up $50,000 a year for the next 20 years, following a recent compromise between trial lawyers and physicians in the Commonwealth. Incremental increases to the cap had been made previously. But once the cap reached $2 million, physicians argued that further increases would result….
Continue ReadingAnother Perspective on the Cardiac Malpractice Crisis in Maryland
Merrill Goozner has an excellent blog on the medical industry. Here’s his take on the cardiac stent “mill” in Baltimore, and how it has come to light and reached some measure of accountability. He writes on his “Gooznews” blog: … let us point out a few interesting aspects of this still evolving story. First, it….
Continue ReadingBaltimore Malpractice Cases Raise Broad Questions about Heart Stents
With lucrative fees for doctors, little oversight, and much disagreement about who needs stents in their heart arteries, it was perhaps inevitable that malpractice allegations of unnecessary surgery would explode into hundreds of lawsuits against a single cardiologist in Baltimore. But now a new report from the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the federal….
Continue ReadingCritical reception for study claiming malpractice laws chase docs from Illinois
Half of all graduating medical residents or fellows trained in Illinois are leaving the state to practice elsewhere, according to a new study, which seems to indicate that as many as 50% of the state’s medical school graduates are turned off by the “toxic” malpractice environment. Critics, however, say the study is just another attempt….
Continue ReadingPharmacists worldwide worry about drug counterfeiting
There is growing concern among pharmacists in developed countries, including the U.S., that drug counterfeiting is a serious problem that current policies and technology have been unable to solve. In a recently published survey commissioned by Pfizer and the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), 63% of 2,000 community, retail and hospital pharmacists in the U.S., Europe….
Continue ReadingMalpractice Victims Speak Out Against Balancing Fed Budget on Their Backs
The federal “debt commission” proposals have a variety of features that would allegedly make medical care more affordable by hurting victims’ right to financial redress if they are hurt by the ongoing epidemic of hospital malpractice and other incidents of preventable medical error. Fortunately consumers are speaking out against these “blame the victim” proposals. Here’s….
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