“Medical malpractice occurs when a healthcare professional neglects to provide appropriate treatment, take appropriate action, or gives substandard treatment that causes harm, injury, or death to a person,” Medical News Today said.

Click here to learn more about Skolnick Weiser Law Firm’s Malpractice capabilities or here to read the full article.

Article with all rights reserved, courtesy of Medical News Today —- https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/
Photo with all rights reserved, courtesy of Canva —- https://www.canva.com/

The post Medical Malpractice Defined by Skolnick Weiser Law Firm appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

“Legal issues and medical evidence can get very complicated very quickly in these cases, and the plaintiff (the injured patient, or his or her legal representative) needs to understand the special procedural rules and compensation limits that come into play,” NOLO said.

Click here to learn more about Skolnick Weiser Law Firm’s Malpractice capabilities or here to read the full article.

Article with all rights reserved, courtesy of NOLO —- https://www.nolo.com/
Photo with all rights reserved, courtesy of Canva —- https://www.canva.com/

The post The Skolnick Weiser Law Firm Explains Ohio Medical Malpractice appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

That’s what the family of an 18-year-old woman alleges regarding the young lady’s suicide just days after she voluntarily admitted herself to the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Akron.

In what can only be described as a cross between a farce and a horror story, the young woman was admitted to Summa St. Thomas Hospital early in the morning on Oct. 13, 2017. She told the hospital staff that she was suicidal and even had a plan in place for how she intended to die. She wanted to hang herself. She had previously attempted suicide by hanging some time earlier and survived only because the cord she chose broke.

While she was reportedly initially calm and relieved to be admitted to the hospital where she knew she would get help, her stay quickly turned into a nightmare. The hospital caught on fire and a male nurse left her alone in a locked ward after promising her he’d return for her.

The young woman eventually called her mother from a pay phone in the psychiatric ward begging for help because she had been abandoned. The mother finally convinced hospital staff members to send someone to look.

Eventually, the woman was safely transferred to Akron City Hospital and placed on suicide watch. By that point, she was inconsolable and hysterical. Despite one psychiatrist’s opinion that she needed at least several days of hospitalization, a second psychiatrist stopped into her room for no longer than 10 minutes and said she was being discharged. He told her to make an appointment to see after he got back from his two-week vacation.

Three days later, the young woman hung herself — just as she had said she would.

The young woman’s family, through her estate, is suing for malpractice based on the fact that she was given inadequate care while suicidal and traumatized. They say that directly led to her death.

Psychiatrists can be held accountable for medical malpractice just like any other medical professional can — and they should be. If your loved one died because of psychiatric neglect, find out more about your legal options.

The post Ohio family sues for malpractice over daughter’s suicide appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

In reality, people should be worried that they won’t receive a proper diagnosis at all. Instead, they may be told their condition is nothing serious and be sent home or given a diagnosis that’s way off track. Alternatively, they may get treated for the wrong ailment entirely.

Two different studies recently demonstrated just how much misdiagnoses factor in medical malpractice claims. One report by malpractice insurer The Doctors Company reviewed malpractice claims involving pediatric cases between 2008 and 2017. They found that 38 percent were attributed to misdiagnoses.

The second study, by malpractice insurer Coverys, focused on claims closed between 2013 and 2017. In its analysis, 46 percent of those claims were due to misdiagnoses. Even worse, Coverys found that 45 percent of the victims of misdiagnosis in its closed malpractice claims had died.

These aren’t the first studies to blame misdiagnoses for large percentages of patient injuries and deaths. A 2015 National Academy of Medicine study called diagnostic errors the third-leading cause of death in hospitals. In 2017, research by the University of Michigan said that 22 percent of hospital malpractice claims involved misdiagnoses.

For patients, this is alarming news.

The number one cause of misdiagnosis is an inadequate medical assessment. To make sure that your doctor considers all possibilities, list all your symptoms carefully. If you’re concerned about anything specific, don’t be afraid to question how a doctor is ruling out a condition. For example, if you’re worried your chest pain is a heart attack but the emergency room doctor says it is simply indigestion, ask the doctor how he or she has ruled out the heart attack.

If you’re told a condition isn’t serious and sent home from the hospital, don’t be afraid to go back if your condition worsens. If necessary, take someone with you so that person can back you up as you assert your right to proper medical care.

Missed and incorrect diagnoses are a serious problem in the American health care system. If you have been injured or a loved one died due to medical errors, it may be time to learn more about your options for recovery.

The post Misdiagnoses and your health: What every patient needs to know appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

The Journal of Emergency Medical Services explains that bullying is a common behavior among doctors, nurses and other health care workers. Why is this so, you may wonder? Health care is a fast-paced, stressful and competitive industry. Doctors and hospital administrators may feel they need to run a tight ship and keep their staff under strict control, and they can use less-than-positive means to maintain order and ensure efficiency. Senior nurses may feel superior to or threatened by newer nurses, and they may even form pecking orders or cliques to ostracize or belittle those they do not like or newcomers who have not proved themselves yet. It is also possible for some members of staff to try to undermine other workers or take credit for their work.

Health care bullying can take the following forms:

• Yelling, threatening, insulting and belittling subordinates
• Conducting hazing rituals or tests for newer members to prove their worth
• Gossiping and ostracizing
• Physically attacking another member of staff

The emotional and physical toll bullying takes on victims can affect you and other patients. For example, an exhausted nurse, or one who feels like she cannot do anything right as a result of constant bullying by other nurses could make a mistake during a procedure. You may receive the wrong medication dosage or the wrong drug, or a member of your medical team could forget to inform your doctor of an important development in your condition.

As you can expect, bullying does not just impact the target of the behavior. The harmful effects of bullying can trickle down to others in the environment.

The post Bullying culture in health care can be detrimental to patients appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

Unfortunately, it happens more often than you may expect, and with a variety of different tests.

For instance, one study looked at doctors who did mammograms at 44 different medical centers. The best one found tumors almost all of the time, edging very close to 100 percent accuracy. However, other centers saw success rates of just 70 percent, meaning that three out of every 10 cases went undiagnosed. Those are not odds that you want to face.

It’s not just mammograms. Doctors also use x-rays. The average amount of misses was a full 21 percent. When you trust your doctor to find cancer, knowing that he or she only averages a 79 percent success rate is concerning.

The range between the best and the worst doctors was also shocking. The average does not tell the whole story. The best doctor located every single tumor on every single x-ray, for a 100 percent success rate. However, the doctor with the worst performance found a mere 27 percent of tumors, missing a gut-wrenching 73 percent of the time.

That said, if you go to an academic medical center, you have better odds. They found cancer and made the right diagnosis in about 88 percent of their cases.

If your doctor fails to find your cancer through negligence, not giving you the care you deserve, you need to know what legal steps to take.

The post Some doctors miss breast cancer a frightening amount of times appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

The revelations came to light after a concerned employee made a report, prompting an internal investigation. The doctor in question has been fired — and another 20 hospital workers have been suspended from patient care until further notice.

The hospital has been unable to explain how so many patients were given lethal doses of medication without triggering a failsafe sooner in the system. Any time a grossly excessive dose of medication is ordered, internal alarms should prevent it from reaching the patient. For example, the hospital pharamacist who filled the drug order from the doctor should have noticed the unusually large doses. Hospital nurses in charge of administering the doses should also have noticed that the dose was dangerous.

At least three wrongful death lawsuits have been filed on behalf of bereaved relatives. One involves a 64-year-old woman who died after receiving a combination of fentanyl and a sedative after the doctor told her husband she was brain-dead. Another involves the death of a 44-year-old man. The third centers around a 79-year-old cancer victim. An attorney speaking for one of the victims expressed what many have thought, saying, “This is not just a simple situation of an error,” but an intentional act.

Some people have already speculated that the medications were delivered as acts of euthanasia. While euthanasia is legal in six states, Ohio is not one of them.

The number of incidents discovered indicates that the hospital failed — deeply — in its responsibility toward its patients. Safeguards can’t just be put in place “in name only.” The hospital has to be proactive about making sure that nobody can play loose and free with patient lives.

If your loved one fell victim to medical malpractice, find out more about your legal rights. Don’t assume that you don’t have a case, no matter what the health of your loved one prior to the incident.

The post Lawsuits claim Ohio doctor administered lethal doses to patients appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

That’s a possibility that has been brought sharply into focus by a recent incident in Ohio involving statements made by a medical professional while she was still a student.

Physicians are supposed to adhere to the Hippocratic Oath which states (among other things), “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings.” One young physician, however, seems to think that some of her fellow human beings are an exception to the rule. She threatened to discriminate against and promised to purposefully harm people of Jewish descent by giving them the wrong medication.

A watchdog agency that aims to expose antisemitism exposed several dozen tweets written by the young doctor — a student at the time — between 2011 and 2013. In them, she called Jewish people “dogs” and called herself unsympathetic toward the Holocaust. She even compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

The young doctor has since apologized for her comments. As a woman of Palestinian descent, she claims she was influenced heavily by the trauma she saw in Palestine when she went there to visit during her summers as a teen. She stated that, at the time, she had “difficulty constructively expressing” her feelings about what was happening but has since learned “tolerance and humanity.” It’s interesting to note, however, that she also claimed that she made her comments “not realizing the harm and offense these words would cause.”

That seems hard to believe. Shortly after her comments came to light, the Cleveland Clinic terminated her residency. There’s also no apparent evidence (yet) that she ever followed through on her threats.

What’s important to understand is that doctors do sometimes act on their personal biases. You could be given less than standard medical care simply because a doctor doesn’t like your religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender expression or something else. As a patient — or the family member of a patient — it’s important to be alert to potential biases from medical professionals. If you suspect a problem, take notes and take action. Request a new physician immediately and don’t take, “No,” for an answer from the hospital’s administration.

The post Ohio physician threatened Jewish patients with malpractice appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

It’s estimated that 400,000 hospital patients a year die of utterly preventable problems, and technology plays a surprising role in many of those deaths. Often, the problems with technology can be summed up as “too much of a good thing.”

Here are some major technology-related dangers you can face in a hospital as a patient:

Alarm fatigue

You press a button to call for assistance from a nurse and nobody comes. It’s a frustrating event if you need help to get to the bathroom or something similar. It’s a devastating problem if, for example, your heart monitor goes off because you’re having a heart attack and nobody responds. The constant din of electronic noises designed to alert hospital staff members to a problem starts to fade into the background for many medical workers. They aren’t ignoring the alerts — they just no longer actively hear them.

Hacks and malware

These days, everything from your refrigerator to your pacemaker is probably connected to the Internet of Things. It’s no big deal if someone hacks your refrigerator. On the other hand, any type of electronic interference with your pacemaker could be a huge problem. Your medical records could also literally be held hostage by hackers for ransom — it’s already happened to some hospitals.

Medication mistakes

What’s technology got to do with your medication? Everything. A Tennessee patient recently died because a nurse typed the first two letters of a drug into a dispensing machine, clicked on the name of the drug that showed up and dispensed a lethal dose of vecuronium — a paralytic agent — instead of Versed, which is a common anti-anxiety drug. Human beings can become far-too reliant on technology to do the “right” thing, and they stop paying attention to daily tasks.

If you have suffered a serious injury from a medical mistake, don’t assume that there’s nothing you can do about it until you’ve found out more about your rights. If a loved one was killed by a medical error, an attorney can explain how a wrongful death claim works.

The post Could technology put your life in danger in the hospital? appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.

Quite possibly.

Despite the fact that few people have heard the term, adenoviruses are very common. They cause a variety of symptoms that are often mistaken for a simple cold, including sore throats, diarrhea, pink eye, bronchitis and pneumonia. Most people recover from a bout with an adenovirus fairly quickly and none the wiser about the existence of the viruses.

However, people with weakened immune systems or those with fragile health conditions like cardiac problems or lung disorders are much more likely to get very sick — or even die — from exposure to an adenovirus. A recent adenovirus outbreak in a New Jersey nursing center, for example, has claimed the lives of at least six children and sickened another dozen.

Unfortunately, a lot of the illnesses and deaths could be prevented if medical professionals remembered one basic commandment of good patient care: the importance of washing their hands between each patient.

Good hygiene is critically important when it comes to preventing the spread of viral infections and other diseases. Adenoviruses are known to transmit very easily when people touch an infected person or object and then touch their own — or someone else’s — nose, mouth or eyes.

While medical professionals are all educated about the importance of clean hands, many get into a hurry and simply get sloppy about remembering to wash or use sanitizer between each patient. In the New Jersey facility, for example, officials were able to determine that there were deficiencies when it came to hand-washing routines.

If you’re a patient — or the family member of a patient — make sure that you insist on clean hands before any medical professional tends to you. Your life may depend upon it!

If you are sickened due to the carelessness or negligence of a hospital worker, an attorney can help you better understand your options and right to compensation.

The post Hand-washing mistakes and adenovirus outbreaks appeared first on Personal Injury Lawyer Cleveland | Car Accident Attorney.