Patient Safety Blog

DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog

• Wisconsin appeals court rejects legal changes that GOP seeks nationally July 12, 2017
  Even as congressional Republicans advance their counter-factual campaign to strip patients who have been harmed while seeking medical services of their rights to seek legal redress, another state appeals court has rejected key GOP arguments about medical malpractice lawsuits. An appellate court in Wisconsin has declared unconstitutional that state’s $750,000 cap on non-economic damages, reinstating a […]
• Better nursing home oversight needed for dangerous facilities July 11, 2017
  Federal regulators need to ramp up their oversight of nursing homes, big time, with recent news reports and studies finding persistent abuses of elderly patients, including during crackdowns on problem operators, and facilities failing to care for vulnerable charges so they don’t lapse into emergency or hospital care. Jordan Rau and the independent Kaiser Health […]
• Are local TV news broadcasts selling out to wealthy medical interests? July 9, 2017
  Just under half of American adults get their news mostly from local television, and this is especially true for the older among us who also happen to be the heaviest users of medical services. But with local TV content hitting new highs for sheer volume—an average of 5.7 hours every day—watchdog groups are expressing a […]
• When placenta-eating mom sickens baby, has star health bunk gone too far? July 7, 2017
  Mocking the vanity, self-absorption, and stupidity of the rich and celebrities may be too feckless a sport. But the tragic spin-offs of the sweeping misinformation their hype mechanisms can generate sometimes just cannot be ignored. If you can take it, New York magazine has put out a detailed story on “The Wellness Epidemic,” a deep […]
• Pathologists’ errors get new scrutiny as medical tests soar in use, importance July 6, 2017
  Pathologists are the medical specialists whom few patients ever meet, but they play increasingly important roles in treatment decisions. Some new reports raise concerns about systematic errors in the path lab. The New York Times painted a surprisingly distanced picture of the work of pathologists in a recent report on these medical doctors who are […]