Medical Malpractice | Lane Brown, LLC

A growing number of hospitals in Chicago and throughout the rest of the country have taken to advertising their emergency room wait times on television, billboards, phone apps, websites, Facebook, and Twitter. They hope to draw in patients who need medical care and do not know where to go.

Most people do not enjoy waiting. When a broken leg, nausea, or other severe malady accompanies that waiting, time can seem to stand still. Naturally, it makes sense for patients to look for a hospital that can get them in and out quickly, right? Well, the answer may be more complicated than that. There are both advantages and disadvantages to advertising short emergency room wait times.

Following are some of the advantages of advertising short emergency room wait times:

Short emergency room wait time goals are an attempt to ensure that patients are seen quickly and have the best possible experience while in the emergency room.
Short emergency room wait time goals can help ensure that hospital emergency room staff members are using their time efficiently.
Short emergency room wait time goals can help increase the volume of patients a hospital sees.

These benefits sound like positives for both patients and hospitals. However, there are also problems with advertising short emergency wait times. These disadvantages include the following:

Patients expecting short emergency room wait times can overcrowd hospitals. If this happens, hospitals may not have the staffing or physical space to stay true to that estimate.
Patients believe that emergency rooms work on a first come, first serve basis. However, this is not the case—the sickest patient always receives care first. You could walk into an empty waiting room with a headache, but if someone comes in after you with a broken leg, you may still have to wait.
Advertising short emergency room wait times serves as a method to woo patients to the hospital, but may leave them with false expectations concerning their emergency room experience.

Emergency room injuries happen every day. Diagnostic mistakes, improper patient intake, and patient file mix-ups, are just a few of the common hospital errors that can cause serious injuries. Emergency room overcrowding can increase the risk of a medical error.

If you think that you have been the victim of an emergency room accident or some other medical error, contact a Chicago medical malpractice attorney at Lane Brown, LLC today. We have the experience, commitment, and knowledge necessary to fight for the justice you deserve. Contact our office at 312-332-1400 to schedule your free consultation. We are standing by to help.

One Boston hospital recently made headlines by doing something almost completely unheard of in the medical community. The hospital began publishing a monthly employee newsletter, openly discussing medical errors made by staff members and telling the stories of these cases from the patient’s perspective.

The goal of the newsletter is to help employees understand the significant impact these medical errors have on patients and the hospital, and to encourage discussion among the staff about possible solutions to the problems. In addition, the hospital administration wants to prevent mistakes from being repeated.

This type of openness is extremely rare in healthcare, for many reasons. Primarily though, employees and their employers fear the consequences of publically reporting medical errors. However, this silence is costly in the following ways:

Two-way communication between staff members and administration may be lacking. While medical mistakes may be reported, employees rarely learn about changes they can make to prevent the error from recurring.
Statistics are not personal. When medical staff learns about actual patient experiences, medical mistakes become more real.
When hospital staff members do not report medical errors because they fear punishment, needed changes to hospital policies, procedures, and patient care do not happen.

If you, or someone you love, were the victim of a medical error and suffered severe injuries as a result, you may be entitled to a cash settlement. Only an experienced Chicago medical malpractice attorney, like those at Lane Brown can help determine if you were a victim of medical negligence. Call our office today at 312-332-1400 to schedule your free consultation. We are standing by to help.

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Heart disease is the leading cause of death for Americans. At the first sign of heart problems, we turn to a cardiologist for help. In order to diagnose and determine the best treatment for a heart condition, cardiologists often order a cardiac catheterization procedure. While necessary for many, the procedure is not without risks including the following:

Excessive bleeding at the site where the catheterization tube enters the artery
Potential blood clots in the arm or leg, which may lead to amputation
Internal bleeding into the abdomen in the event the artery is during the procedure

A cardiac catheterization procedure serves as a vital diagnostic tool to evaluate the condition of the heart. However, if a patient comes into the emergency room with symptoms that mimic a heart condition, such as indigestion, or abnormal, yet inconclusive, stress test results, this test may be unnecessary and extremely risky.

Sometimes, during a diagnostic cardiac catheterization procedure, doctors find a narrow or blocked artery. They are often able to clear the blockage right away using arterial stents. This procedure, while it can be life saving, also carries risks such as the following:

Equipment could cause a clogged blood vessel, which may block necessary oxygen from the heart
Equipment could puncture the coronary artery
Patients could experience complications including heart attack, stroke, and death. According to one study, one or two out of every 100 patients experience complications.
Stents can cause a build-up of scar tissue at their location. They can also cause blood clots to develop, which could cause a massive heart attack.

If you recently had a cardiac catheterization procedure, and suffered injuries afterwards, you may be the victim of medical negligence. Only an experienced Chicago medical malpractice attorney at Lane Brown can evaluate the details of your injuries, consult with qualified medical professionals, and determine if you have a legal claim. Call us today at 312-332-1400 for a free case evaluation. We are here to help.

A jury in Los Angeles last Friday awarded $8.3 million to a man who accused a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson of knowingly marketing a faulty hip implant that was later recalled. It was the first of approximately 10,000 lawsuits which have already been brought, with many more sure to come throughout at least the United States. The basis for the cases is its design which places metal on metal components in a way that can cause metal poisoning and other health issues. The Wall Street Journal noted that, in a statement issued after Friday’s ruling, DePuy spokesperson Lorie Gawreluk said the company maintains that the ASR XL hip implants were not designed defectively and it is planing to appeal the decision, based on the results of post-trial motions. The jurors who heard the case, however, clearly disagreed. After the verdict, one juror reportedly stated that he “wanted punitive damages”, citing “evidence that DePuy took too long to correct problems found with the device.” In August, 2010, Johnson & Johnson is reported to have recalled 93,000 of the implants, when it said 12 percent failed within five years. Meanwhile, analysts are projecting that overall, lawsuits over the device “could cost J&J billions of dollars to resolve.” For more information about our firm, and how you can take action for your injuries, please contact us at 312-332-1400 or visit our website at lanebrownlaw.com.

Your parent or other loved one is admitted to a hospital or nursing home because they are ill, or have been injured. They are there because they need assistance or care that they can’t get in their home. Unfortunately, many times patients in hospitals and nursing homes aren’t given the attention they need, and suffer injuries because of malpractice or negligence in their hospital or medical care.

Another common concern for hospitalized patients is posed by the risk of falls. Patients are often disoriented, weak or sedated. Common issues associated with nurses and hospitals are falls due to the lack of the use of rails or supervision during transfers. An elderly confused patient, or a patient narcotized with pain medicine or sedatives, requires full length side rails up so they can’t fall out of bed.

Rails can be important aids in the protection of patients who may be combative, uncooperative or unstable patient. The failure to use rails appropriately may be the basis for a negligence claim. If the nurses’ notes show they did not raise the side rails, or if witnesses establish that the rails were not raised, and the patient falls out of bed and injures himself, those injuries may have been the result of negligence on the part of the hospital and the nurses. Physicians may also be responsible if the doctor was aware that the patient needed the protections afforded by side rails, but failed to order that they be used.

Nurses have an independent duty to ensure the safety of their patients, so you should look to examine the conduct of all three potential causes for the injury: the nurse, the hospital and the doctor. Nurses are trained, and need to be able to determine for themselves whether or not their patients need side rails. If they do, they can and must follow good nursing practice and hospital policy and raise the rails themselves, even without a doctor’s order. In fact, the question of when to use side rails is or should be indicated in the hospital rules of almost every hospital, as set forth by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH). If the hospital accepts elderly Medicare-insured patients, that hospital must be certified by the JCAH, and the JCAH states that with elderly, confused, or drugged patients, side rails must be used.

Were the Nurses Too Busy?

Sometimes, the nurses are just too busy to give their patients the care they need. Consider whether there was an emergency that required their attention to other patients. Maybe their unit was understaffed. Through the litigation process known as “discovery”, we can find this information, and obtain the “nursing orders” in effect for all the patients on that nursing unit (floor or ward) and their diagnoses. If the nursing unit was understaffed by a hospital looking to make higher profits from lower labor costs, it’s often easy to see why patients fail to receive the nursing and hospital care they need.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has established new guidelines for managing patients who are suspected of having suffered a stroke. Eligible patients presenting to the hospital with ischemic stroke should receive recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rTPA) within 60 minutes of arrival, according to the new ischemic stroke guidelines.
Published in Stroke, the guidelines include the following new or revised recommendations:
• Patients with suspected stroke should be quickly taken to the closest certified primary stroke center or comprehensive stroke center. If no such centers exist, they should be taken to the most appropriate institution that provides emergency stroke care.
• In community hospitals without onsite stroke expertise, telestroke consultation with stroke education and training for clinicians could help increase use of rTPA.
• Intravenous fibrinolysis may be considered in patients with mild stroke deficits, rapidly improving stroke symptoms, major surgery in the prior 3 months, and recent myocardial infarction.
• Efforts should be made to reduce the time from symptom onset to reperfusion with intra-arterial therapies.