incapacitated by brain damage

The National Law Journal (4/2, Bronstad) reports, “A lawsuit filed against Ford Motor Co. on behalf of consumers alleging economic damages tied to sudden acceleration comes months after Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to pay more than $1 billion in cash and repair costs to resolve similar claims.” The Journal continues, “The suit, filed on March 28, asserts that Ford, despite receiving hundreds of reports of electronics defects tied to sudden acceleration, failed to install brake override systems in some North American vehicles until 2010, even though it knew about problems as early as 2002. As a result, the cars manufactured during that interval put drivers in an ‘unreasonably dangerous’ situation, the suit says.”

If you or a loved one have suffered a severe injury, the law offices of Lane Brown, LLC can help you. Please contact us or call now (312) 332-1400 for an immediate consultation with an injury attorney in Chicago, Illinois.

If you suspect a manufacturing or design defect caused your auto accident and serious injury, we invite you to contact our office. A lawyer with experience in defective equipment claims will provide a free consultation and case review.

Kudos to the American Association for Justice (AAJ)! Today AAJ filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on proposed rulemaking governing the regulation of used cars and the installment of event data recorders in cars, respectively.

The proposed rules by the FTC regarding the sale of used motor vehicles raised consumer protection concerns and AAJ’s comments focused on the liability issues expressed during the Regulatory Review Notice comment period. AAJ specifically opposes the creation of a “safe harbor” for car dealers even if they demonstrate compliance with proposed disclosure requirements.

Comments to NHTSA responded to the agency’s proposal that all light vehicles be equipped with event data recorders (EDRs) or “black boxes” by September 2014. AAJ urged NHTSA to strengthen their regulatory framework by enhancing the availability of EDR data as well as ensuring data accuracy. Also, data recorder equipment malfunctions should not bar litigants from fully investigating their cases through formal discovery requests.

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.

The FDA has issued a “Warning Letter”, dated January 10, 2013, to St. Jude Medical, a company that manufactures many medical devices used throughout the world, including implantable cardiac devices. In the letter, St, Jude was advised that, during a 2012 inspection of St. Jude’s Sylmar, California facility, FDA investigators determined that St. Jude manufactured implantable cardiac leads which were “adulterated” under federal law, in that the methods used in, or the facilities or controls used for, their manufacture, packing, storage, or installation are not in conformity with the current good manufacturing practice requirements of the Quality System regulation found at Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 820. While St. Jude has responded to some of the concerns addressed by the investigators,the FDA has concluded that the responses were inadequate.

The FDA has asked St. Jude to provide written notice within fifteen business days from the date they received the warning letter of the specific steps St. Judey has taken to correct the noted violations, as well as an explanation of how the firm plans to prevent these violations, or similar violations, from occurring again. They asked that St. Jude include documentation of the corrections and/or corrective actions (including any systemic corrective actions) that the firm has taken. If St. Jude’s planned corrections and/or corrective actions will occur over time, they are to include a timetable for implementation of those activities. If corrections and/or corrective actions cannot be completed within fifteen business days, St. Jude was asked to state the reason for the delay and the time within which these activities will be completed. Finally, the warning letter notes that St. Jude’s “response should be comprehensive and address all violations included in this Warning Letter.” We’ll see…but it looks like the FDA is finally running out of patience with St. Jude.

Cars and trucks that are too quiet? In fact, it appears that some vehicles are so quiet that they may be dangerous! The National Highway Transportation Safety Agency has proposed a new safety standard, as required by the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act (PSEA) of 2010, which proposes to establish a Federal motor vehicle safety standard (FMVSS) setting minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles. This new standard would require hybrid and electric passenger cars, light trucks and vans (LTVs), medium and heavy duty, trucks, and buses, low speed vehicles (LSVs), and motorcycles to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to electric vehicles (EVs) and to those hybrid vehicles (HVs) which are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle’s internal combustion engine (ICE) operating. This standard would ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles, as required by the PSEA, by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians would be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle.