Most people are familiar with the Hippocratic Oath by which all doctors and medical professionals live. But a doctor’s duty to make the best judgments possible and to do no harm is often mired by the looming threat that if they fail to meet these expectations, they could face litigation as a result.
When aging loved ones in New York require consistent care, it is a common practice for their family members to place them into a long-term care facility, such as a nursing home. While most nursing homes are professionally run, the unfortunate reality is that some facilities have low standards of patient care, or even a history of negligence and abuse. In the past, standard arbitration clauses in facility contracts made it difficult for families to hold a nursing home or negligent nurse accountable for their negative behavior.
Every parent hopes that their child will be born happy and healthy. Unfortunately, when mistakes are made in the delivery room or a member of the hospital staff misses a warning sign, children and mothers can suffer serious injuries that can require everything from extensive medical treatment to long-term care.
Neurologists in New York must consider symptoms and neural imagining in order to accurately diagnose dementia diseases. Alzheimer’s disease is often presumed to be present in people exhibiting changes in behavior, language, motor skills and personality, but frontotemporal lobar degeneration and primary progressive aphasias represent two diseases that could also cause these problems.
The BMJ has published a study indicating that medical errors result in between 200,000 and 400,000 deaths annually across the United States. The BMJ estimate took into account diagnostic errors, communications breakdowns, systems failures, inadequate skill and poor judgment. The focus of the study was fatalities that occur secondary to a medical error, and many occurred in New York.
New York patients may be interested in the results of a study that found that men and women encounter different safety issues in medical situations. For example, women are more likely to have adverse reactions to drugs that they have been administered, ranging from rashes to low blood pressure to changes in their mental state. Men are more likely to get abrasions and cuts.
Women throughout the country are urged by their health care providers to get annual screenings in order to detect possibly deadly diseases and illnesses, such as cancer, before they reach their advanced stages. In addition, women are also encouraged to talk to their doctor about any symptoms they are experiencing that could indicate a serious health problem.
While New Yorkers likely have trusting relationships with their doctors, there are certain times when they should seek second opinions to make certain that the diagnosis or treatment regimen that has been proposed is appropriate. Health care practitioners sometimes make diagnostic or treatment mistakes, which can cause serious repercussions for patients.
Medical errors can cover a wide variety of situations. The wrong medication dose could be given to a patient, or a nick from a scalpel during surgery could cause internal bleeding or neurological injury. Surprisingly, the majority of errors take place in connection with visits to a physician’s office rather than in the context of hospital stays. However, the number of such errors annually makes this the third leading cause of death in the nation. New York healthcare professionals may need to consider some important issues related to medical errors in order to turn the statistical tide.
Workers in New York hospitals might make errors because of confusion about patient identities. When the ECRI Institute analyzed 7,613 wrong-patient incidents voluntarily supplied by 181 health care organizations around the country, patient identification errors took place at all levels, including among physicians, nurses, transporters, lab technicians and pharmacists.
