Connecticut updates in category: Medical Malpractice

Hartford Hospital, the state's second-largest facility in terms of licensed beds, is on probation for a year after complaints arose about its emergency and operating rooms. State officials discovered 28 complaints over a two-year period based on patient surveys. The Department of Health found serious issues during the course of its investigation. There were a number of patient care issues on a...

Patients seeking urgent care in U.S. emergency rooms are waiting longer than in the 1990s, especially people with heart attacks, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday. The longer waits affect insureds and uninsureds equally. They found a quarter of heart attack victims waited 50 minutes or more before seeing a doctor in 2004. Waits for all types of emergency department visits became 36 percent...

Vermont hospitals recently adopted a policy not to seek payment from patients or insurance companies if certain rare errors are made that result in serious harm. The 14 Vermont hospitals will follow a uniform system that officials said will make the hospitals more accountable. The policy will cover eight, serious medical errors including surgery performed on a wrong body part or on the wrong...

In the latest lawsuit filed against St. Francis Hospital, the victims allege that the doctor accused of sexually abusing his child patients used a gun to threaten the children and raped some of the victims. The lawsuits accuse St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford of failing to protect them from Dr. George Reardon. He was a chief of endocrinology at the hospital and practiced...

In the latest lawsuit filed against St. Francis Hospital, the victims alllege that the doctor accused of sexually abusing his child patients used a gun to threaten the children and raped some of the victims. The lawsuits accuse St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford of failing to protect them from Dr. George Reardon. He was a chief of endocrinology at the hospital and practiced...

Connecticut law requires that a medical malpractice lawsuit be initiated within two years from the date when the injury is first sustained or discovered or in the exercise of reasonable care should have been discovered. The law also requires that it be initiated within three years from the date of the act or omission complained of (CGS § 52-584). (The courts typically refer to the two year...

Laws were passed in Florida in 2003 to reform the medical malpractice insurance industry. Rates rose 98 percent in some specialization during the time period between 1998 and 2002. Doctors were hoping the reform would lower their medical malpractice rates. A new study has shown that claims have gone down but rates have only decreased slightly. It is hoped that rates will continue to decrease...

Medtronic has issued a product recall for Sprint Fidelis Defibrillator leads because of possible fractures in the lines. The defibrillator leads have been on the market since 2004 and the FDA did not require human testing before gaining approval. The model was close enough to a previous one to not warrent it. Medtronic did perform short-term testing on humans before seeking FDA approval...

A Salem man had surgery on his gall bladder in August 1999. He was in pain following the surgery and visited with two doctors. Both of the doctors failed to diagnose a bile leak and he needed to have emergency surgery to fix the problem. He sued for medical malpractice and the jury awarded him and his wife $210,000. Kevin Cummings said he first went to Dr. Lakshmanan about pain following the...

A heart assistance device manufactured by Thoratec has been recalled because the device may function incorrectly. The defective medical device has been used at 87 hospitals in the United States and around the world since 2004. The device is surgically implanted in patients and it may become bent. Thoratec notified the hospitals of potential problem in an Oct. 19 recall notification letter,...

The Bush Administration announced that Medicare will no longer pay the extra costs of treating preventable errors, injuries and infections that occur in hospitals. Until this policy change, Medicare covered expenses stemming from hospital errors. Privare insurers are now also making a similar policy change in an attempt to save money. The new policy does poses some interesting questions...

A woman lies on the ground dying from a perforated bowel. She is in pain, vomitting up blood and asking for help. Incredibly, this was happening in an emergency room. At the King-Harbor hospital in Los Angeles, this woman, her boyfriend and an unidentified person pleaded with the hospital for help. Their pleas for help were ignored. Calls were made to 911 requesting that an ambulance take...

Studies say that up to 40,000 surgery patients a year are left awake but paralyzed during surgery.Two West Virginia women say that experience caused their father to commit suicide.Sherman Sizemore, a former coal miner and Baptist minister, killed himself in February 2006, two weeks after undergoing abdominal surgery. The family has filed a lawsuit claiming medical malpractice. According to the...

I am always looking for a catchy phrase that describes how and why a doctor has committed malpractice. The latest phrase I have discovered is diagnosis momentum. This phrase describes the tendency of each doctor brought into a case to accept blindly the initial doctor's diagnosis. It is like a rock rolling down a mountain, where the farther it rolls down the more force it gains, crushing...

The rate for Caesarean Sections in the Bay State rose from 31% in 2004 to 32% in 2005. That is about two thirds of all births. There were approximately 77,000 live births in the state in 2005. Doctors cite many reasons for the increase including older women, multiple births, and malpractice fears. The more risk factors there are with a pregnancy, increases the likelihood that a doctor will...