Archive for the ‘Medical Malpractice’ Category

PITTSBURGH – A western Pennsylvania newspaper says people in the commonwealth are paying millions of dollars for repeat hospital stays to treat complications or infections that might have been avoided. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review says hospitals charged more than $1.25 billion for such readmissions in 2009, according to an analysis of the latest data from the …

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (2/25, Fabregas) reported, “Hospital-acquired germs may have contributed to several thousand rehospitalizations in Pennsylvania,” according to a review by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. The group found that “23,287 people got hospital-acquired infections in 2009, or 1.2 percent of the 1.9 million patients admitted to hospitals statewide. Nearly 30 percent …

If you or anyone you know is dealing with ovarian cancer, please read this. HealthDay (2/10, Preidt) reported, “More than one-quarter of women with apparent early-stage ovarian cancer don’t receive recommended lymph node biopsies to check for cancer spread, which nearly doubles these patients’ risk of death,” according to a study in the journal Gynecological …

  This is a pretty intuitive finding, but it’s a reminder that overworked hospital personnel are not just a danger to themselves, but their patients.HealthDay (1/19, Preidt) reported that “patients in hospitals where nurses work long hours are much more likely to die of pneumonia and heart attack,” according to a study published in the …

Reducing the epidemic of hospital acquired infections has been a primary goal for hospital administrators and federal regulators alike over the past few years. A prime cause of hospital infections, poor hand washing practices by healthcare workers, has been in the cross hairs. Now health care workers are encouraged to wash before each and every …

If you’ve purchased any “chelation” products, read this… The Washington Post (10/15, Stein) reports that on Oct. 14, officials from the Food and Drug Administration “announced a crackdown on” chelation, “a controversial therapy widely hawked on the Internet and elsewhere as an alternative treatment for conditions such as autism, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease by …

  The CBS Evening News (9/30, story 8, 4:20, Couric) reported, “America’s hospitals are places of healing and hope, but they’re also home to a growing threat. … An increasing number of patients are being infected with a new class of superbugs that are difficult, if not impossible to treat.” On a parallel note, the …

  On its website, ABC News (9/22, Carollo) reported, “A former Food and Drug Administration official who helped get the vision correction surgery LASIK approved back in the 1990s but later spoke out against the procedure is taking his concerns directly to current regulators at the FDA.” Yesterday, “Morris Waxler, who is now an independent …

  The Kansas City Business Journal (9/13, Van Dyke) reports, “Even as medicine has advanced, the number of medical errors – conditions and injuries obtained in the hospital – has hovered around 1 million a year. These errors cost the system, especially hospitals, billions of dollars a year.” A study “published this year by the …

  The New York Times (8/24, D5, Rabin) reports that, according to a study published Aug. 24 in the journal Radiology, “certain nuclear-based breast imaging exams that involve injecting radioactive material into patients expose women to far higher doses of radiation than regular mammography, increasing their risk of cancer in vulnerable organs beyond the breast, …