Birth Injuries and Birth Trauma
Pregnancy and childbirth are two extremely complex medical conditions which require the care of experienced doctors. The reason for this is that there is much that can go wrong during pregnancy and childbirth, leading to birth injuries – some of which can be so severe that they are then classified as birth traumas.
Anesthesia Errors and Anesthesia Aspiration
Anesthesia is used for most medical procedures as a method of pain management. There are different types of anesthesia which are used for different medical procedures. This is dependent on the type of surgery and where on the body the surgery is taking place. The type of anesthesia used for major surgeries is called general anesthesia.
Risks of General Anesthesia
Due to the nature of major surgery and the medications involved, there are several risks associated with the use of general anesthesia which your doctor should discuss with you. Some major risks associated with general anesthesia include:
Burnout and Nursing Negligence
Nurse burnout is a physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion experienced by nurses which negatively affects patient outcomes and leads to job dissatisfaction. The number of nursing negligence lawsuits has increased due to nurse burnout, which is largely caused by organizational factors.
Nursing negligence is an unfortunate and often unavoidable consequence of nurse burnout. Stress, long working hours, infrequent breaks, and rotating shifts slow down reaction times, increases errors, and reduces motivation. All of these factors affect patient care.
Causes of Failure to Diagnose in Primary Care
A doctor’s failure to diagnose occurs when they are negligent or fail to take the necessary steps to determine the nature of your illness, which then causes you harm. The reason for this harm is because a doctor’s failure to diagnose can lead to incorrect or delayed treatment being administered or worse, no treatment is administered at all.
There are several factors that contribute to failure to diagnose within the primary healthcare system, with some being more prevalent than others. Such diagnostic errors include:
The Root Causes of Medical Errors
There are many causes of medical errors, something which is defined as a preventable adverse effect of medical care, whether it is evidently harmful to you or not.
Many people have suffered greatly due to medical errors. Some of these errors have occurred because there have been numerous factors involved, however, many of these errors have occurred because of medical malpractice and medical negligence and are thus viable cases for medical malpractice lawsuits.
Scalding Injuries in the Kitchen and Elsewhere in the Home
The term “burn injury” encompasses many different types of scenarios and situations. While some of these happen in public spaces, many of them happen in the private living spaces of the injury victims. There are also various types of burn injuries that individuals can sustain, some of which result in emergency scenarios, while others are routinely caused by mis-calibrations of equipment or home appliances. Can kitchen tap water become hot enough to burn? Of course it can. It’s simply a question of how boilers and water heaters are set up. People tend to immediately think of scalding as something that happens in bathtubs, but scalding water certainly can come out of any faucet. And leaving a young child alone in the kitchen for even a short time can lead to a scalding incident, particularly if the water systems themselves weren’t established by a technician or engineer who understands water temperature safety.
Surgical Error Leads to Healthy Baby Mistakenly Receiving a Frenectomy
In December 2015, Jennifer Melton gave birth to a healthy baby boy at the University Medical Center in Lebanon, Tennessee. Nate was only a day old when he was taken for a surgical procedure that he was never meant to have.
Nate was in the hospital’s nursery when he was taken by a nurse for a frenectomy whereby the tissue that connects the tongue to the floor of the mouth was cut. This is a surgery that another child was meant to undergo to remediate his “tongue-tie.”
A frenectomy is a simple surgical procedure of the mouth that removes one or both of the frena (connective tissue membrane that attaches one surface of the mouth to another). A lingual frenum is a connective tissue that connects the tongue to the bottom of the mouth. This is the frenum that is removed when a child has a “tongue tie” that affects their ability to speak and/or feed properly.
Medical Malpractice Lawsuits on The Rise
Medical malpractice is something which occurs when a healthcare professional fails to provide you with appropriate treatment, omits to take appropriate action, or gives substandard treatment that causes harm, injury, or even death to you or a family member.
Medical malpractice lawsuits make it possible for you or your family member to recover compensation from any harm that has resulted from sub-standard treatment.
As of 2017, it was reported by “Medscape” that there were between 15,000 and 19,000 medical malpractice lawsuits in the United States alone. These statistics can be further broken down to reveal the following:
Common Doctor Errors
As with general medical errors, a doctor error is a preventable adverse effect of care that you suffer at the hands of your doctor which causes you harm. Unlike a general medical error, which can be caused by various healthcare professionals and associated personnel, doctor errors are specific to your treating doctor.
Some doctor errors are more common than others. The following errors are commonly featured in various medical malpractice lawsuits, and it is important that you are aware of these common doctor errors so that you can help ensure that they do not happen to you.
Hospital Negligence Led to Esmin Green’s Death
In 2008, a woman named Esmin Green died in the waiting room of Brooklyn’s King’s County Hospital Center in full view whilst hospital personnel did nothing to assist her. Ms. Green was a 49-year-old Jamaican immigrant who was admitted to the hospital as a psychiatric patient. She had been waiting for nearly 24 hours in the hospital’s waiting room before collapsing onto the waiting room floor due to a blood clot.
Hospital staff failed to provide basic medical care to Ms. Green and then tried to cover up their neglect. However, the incident was caught on one of the hospital’s cameras. The New York Civil Liberties Union and other lawyers were able to use this footage in a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital for hospital negligence.