Tired of reading doctor report cards and not knowing which ones to believe? Now there’s an organization that reviews the plethora of health care report cards available online in order to provide you with clear choices about the sites that really do provide accurate and useful information. The Informed Patient Institute provides detailed analysis of….
Continue ReadingNursing Care
When doctors and nurses disagree about a patient, who decides?
Doctors and nurses bring different values, different training, and different snapshots of patients to the process of care, so it’s no wonder they can disagree. Often the disagreements are not about technical issues but about basic human values where there is no clear right and wrong. Theresa Brown, R.N., has an excellent column in the….
Continue ReadingAnesthetist or Anesthesiologist: What You Need to Know Before Surgery
Nurse anesthetists have been proven to deliver about as safe and high quality care as physician anesthesiologists, but there’s still a key question every patient should ask before being put to sleep by a nurse anesthetist. “Is there a doctor anesthesiologist nearby in case there’s an emergency during my surgery?” That’s the question you need….
Continue ReadingTexas Nurses Vindicated in Fight for Patient Safety — Almost
Two nurses who were fired from their hospital for alerting state authorities to a dangerous doctor have now been fully vindicated — except for one thing. The nurses won a $750,000 settlement of their lawsuit against the Winkler County (Texas) Memorial Hospital and the local authorities who criminally prosecuted them for their complaint to the….
Continue ReadingPediatric Malpractice: Real-Life Testimony
Mary Ellen Mannix lost her baby son James to an unexplained event in a hospital intensive care unit. It took persistent digging by her lawyer to work through the cover story of the providers who cared for James. Here is an excerpt from Mary Ellen’s book, “Split the Baby: One Child’s Journey through Medicine and….
Continue ReadingCan Malpractice Be Prevented by Mandating Nurse Staffing Levels?
As noted many times on this blog, nurses are the patient safety mainstays of good hospital care. So should hospitals be required to maintain a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio? California has done so, and nurse Theresa Brown wrote an op-ed recently in the New York Times discussing a proposed federal mandate (which seems to be going….
Continue ReadingA Life-Saving Number: The Nurse-to-Patient Ratio
The greatest fear for any patient in the hospital, and the biggest nightmare for their families, is that something will go wrong suddenly and no one will respond until it’s too late. Beeping monitors are no help if their alarms go unheeded. Patient safety experts know that one basic way to keep patients safe and….
Continue ReadingMaryland Court Upholds Legal Protection for Nurse Whistleblowers
Nurses are the front-line protectors of patient safety in hospitals, nursing homes and anywhere patients are treated. So to avoid patients being hurt by medical malpractice, it’s important to protect nurses from being fired if they speak up when they see dangerous care. The Maryland Court of Appeals has just recognized this important principle of….
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