Massachusetts updates tagged with 'Medical Malpractice'

In a spectacular decision this week affirming victims rights, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that damages are recoverable where a physicians negligence reduced the decedents chance...

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Why should anyone fall seven times in a nursing home??Seems like a reasonable question...one asked by a client of ours when his mother died after seven falls from her wheelchair. Unfortunately, the decedent had never been evaluated as a fall risk, nor had the client been consulted about a possible safety restraint, known as a "lap buddy" that could have prevented the death.When you admit a...

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My own personal experience this weekend served to remind me how and why it is so difficult to get jurors in medical negligence cases to appreciate and acknowledge the concept of preventable medical error.My mother in law is battling an agressive lymphoma and received last chance chemotherapy treatments over the weekend. The care she received from her caregivers was compassionate and remarkable....

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The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently issued a very practical but controversial decision. The court held that the mother of a boy struck and killed by a car could sue the drivers doctor because the doctor failed to warn the driver of the risks associated with taking certain medications.This may appear harsh, but it is nothing more than a logical extension of the existing law of...

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A Worcester Superior Court jury awarded $2.5 million in damages to a Massachusetts woman misdiagnosed with HIV. She was given a powerful array of drug treatments for nearly nine years before discovering she was misdiagnosed.The malpractice lawsuit alleged the doctor, at University of Massachusetts Medical Center, failed to order the proper tests to confirm the diagnosis even after several blood...

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Protecting charitable organizations from liability for the negligence of the organization or its employees, may sound noble, but is in fact, unfair. The immunity doesn't really accomplish its goals, and insures that employees of an organization involved in a personal injury lawsuit, will be sued instead of the organization. Here's the way it works in Massachusetts. By statute, M.G.L. c. 231,...

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A great deal of attention has been paid lately - rightfully so - to the subject of infections contracted in hospitals. Less focus has been placed on another source of serious and preventable injuries in hospitals - falls. The result of a fall down injury in a hospital may be severe. Patients are ill and often debilitated or disoriented to begin with. If a patient's condition presents any...

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The problem of medication errors has by now been well-reviewed, and efforts to minimize such errors are underway in hospitals and doctors' offices across the country. Nevertheless, the problem of medication errors has proven to be a very stubborn one. In his groundbreaking book, "To Err is Human," Lucien Leape, M.D., estimated that medication errors caused approximately 98,000 deaths per year....

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A couple of weeks ago, a Suffolk County Superior Court jury in Boston, rejected the claim of former New England Patriots offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis, that doctors botched his gastric bypass surgery. The defense verdict came at the end of the second trial of the case. The first jury hearing the case was deadlocked, leading to a mistrial. Weis had claimed that his surgeons allowed...

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I wonder if anyone has ever calculated the number of words per hour spoken during the average jury trial. The right words, used the right way, can evoke the most powerful of images, associations, and emotions. Words can also drone on and become little more than background noise to the listener. The lawyer trying a case involving catastrophic personal injury, has a challenge. He may need to...

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An article in Saturday's Boston Globe illustrated the gap that sometimes exists between written procedures and implementation. The article also highlighted the ongoing danger from surgeries on the wrong part of a patient's body. Five hundred fifty-two cases of wrong-site surgery have been reported by American hospitals since 1995; there are undoubtedly many unreported cases. The incident covered...

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On Tuesday, a jury found against Notre Dame Football coach Charlie Weis, in his medical malpractice lawsuit. The suit claimed two doctors botched his after-care following gastric bypass surgery five years ago. The jury reached their decision in less than a day, finding two Massachusetts General Hospital surgeons were not negligent.Weis, 51, claimed the surgeons were negligent for allowing him to...

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Imagine a plane crash in which the co-pilot knew of another plane on a collision course, but decided not to tell the pilot, figuring he'd get the information on his own. Imagine a firefighter knowing a roof is about to collapse, but failing to warn his colleagues because he thought his colleagues were highly skilled and the signs of impending collapse were obvious. Unthinkable? Of course. Yet,...

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This week's Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly newspaper reported a defendant's verdict in a sad case. The plaintiff had suffered a massive stroke leaving him paralyzed on half of his body and with other terrible deficits. The allegation was that the stroke was caused due to mismanagement of lung surgery following pneumonia. The case was tried by an attorney considered to be a very fine plaintiff's...

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In a previous blog, I wrote about day-in-the-life videos. These are videos that film a severely injured plaintiff and capture vignettes of a typical day, in a 20 - 30 minute movie. If done properly, they can be shown to a jury at trial. Another tool that any lawyer representing a client with catastrophic injuries may consider, is a video settlement brochure. In the video settlement brochure, the...

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