Phoenix Medical Malpractice Law Blog

American Medical News (2/21, O'Reilly) reports, "For more than a decade, patient safety leaders have urged medicine to shift from an approach that shames and blames individual doctors and nurses for medical errors to a 'culture of safety' where open discussion and reporting about adverse events, mistakes, disruptive behavior and unsafe conditions are prized rather than punished." An increasing "body of evidence is showing that higher safety culture scores are correlated with better clinical outcomes and lower rates of hospital-acquired conditions." However, "data released in February by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality show that most physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals working in hospitals believe their organizations are still more interested in punishing missteps and enforcing hierarchy than in encouraging open communication and using adverse-event reports to learn what's gone wrong."

The National Football League faces multiple lawsuits by ex-players who claim the league failed to protect them from long-term brain damage caused by concussions. At least eight class actions allege that the league ignored medical research linking multiple concussions to permanent brain damage, failed to warn players of the dangers, and returned players to games too soon, which caused additional brain injuries.

An advisory panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that the threshold for children's lead exposure be cut in half in light of new evidence that tiny amounts of the metal can irreversibly harm children's health. The Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention report marks the first change in the lead exposure limit for children since 1991, when it was set at 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood.

In "Ezra Klein's Wonkblog," the Washington Post (2/2, Kliff) discusses a "study, published this week in the online journal PLoS One," which "examined medical errors at two Australian hospitals before and after implementing an e-prescribing system, where doctors use a computer to assist with ordering medications. The computer system studied here reviewed the patient's current medications, alerted the prescriber to any potential conflicts, and then sent the order off, electronically, to the pharmacy." Notably, "when hospitals...switched to e-prescribing, the impact was pretty impressive. Error rates in prescriptions dropped by 60 percent, the researchers found."

Bloomberg News (2/2, Feeley) reports, "GlaxoSmithKline Plc which is paying $3 billion to resolve government claims that it illegally marketed drugs such as the Avandia diabetes medication, agreed to settle more lawsuits over the pills, a lawyer said." Bloomberg adds, "Glaxo, the UK's biggest drugmaker, agreed last month to resolve more than 20,000 cases alleging Avandia causes heart attacks, said Paul Kiesel, a lawyer for former users. The accord, reached in court-ordered mediation, included a case that was set for trial in state court in Los Angeles, he said."

The CBS Evening News (1/31, story 10, 0:25, Pelley) reported, "Pfizer is recalling about a million packets of birth control pills. The drug maker says a packaging problem may leave women with an inadequate dose. Pfizer says there's no health risk, just a greater chance of unintended pregnancy. You can find the names of the recalled pills at CBSNews.com." Reuters (2/1) also reports this story.

An article in the February issue of Washingtonian magazine (2/1, Vaida), entitled "Minor Mistakes, Deadly Results," produced with Kaiser Health News, reports on causes and prevention methods for hospital malpractice. Citing federal estimates that in 2010, faulty medical care contributed to the deaths of 15,000 Medicare patients each month, it says the core reasons are that hospitals "are hierarchical organizations resistant to change, they haven't done enough to create environments in which patient safety is a priority, and they've been reluctant to share patient-safety data with the public." Examining the patient safety efforts of five Washington area hospitals, the author found them employing such strategies as using checklists, enforcing hand-washing rules, breaking down hierarchical communication barriers and moving to digital records. Checklist use can help prevent the estimated 40 "wrong-site" operations occur in the US each week, and Johns Hopkins cut ICU bloodstream infections by 90 percent by consistently using checklists.

"If a 747 jetliner crashed every day, killing all 500 people aboard, there would be a national uproar over aviation safety and an all-out mobilization to fix the problem." However, "in the nation's hospitals...about the same number of people die on average every day from medical 'adverse events,' many of them preventable errors, such as infections or incorrect medications. Where's the outrage?" USA TODAY Editorial 11/19/10