Maryland Medical Malpractice Attorney Blog

Plastic surgery malpractice cases are extremely difficult to win not because malpractice in plastic surgery is rare but because it is incredibly difficult to prove. We have never taken a plastic surgery malpractice case and probably never will.

So credit is due to a New Jersey plaintiffs' medical malpractice lawyer who won a jury verdict in an eye surgery case. The case involves a blepharoplasty, eyelid surgery that basically makes your eyes look younger.

Defendant's medical malpractice lawyer showed the generosity of spirit for which malpractice defense lawyers are known, when he pointed out in a statement after the verdict that the woman had plastic surgery on 10 previous occasions. What exactly is this lawyer's point? You just lost a case - a zero offer case, by the way. After getting beat, do you really have to go after the plaintiff? What exactly is the point that is made here? She had 10 good procesures so what is one bad one? She should not be getting more plastic surgery? Than why did this doctor agree to do it? Oh, who cares? The important thing was to try to publicly embarrass the Plaintiff. Well, then, mission accomplished.

Like every hospital, Johns Hopkins makes medication errors that cause people serious injuries. Unlike some other hospitals, Hopkins is vigorously fighting back. This is what makes them Johns Hopkins.

The Journal of Psychiatric Practice provides an article that details how the 88-bed psychiatric unit at Hopkins leaped from a medication error rate of 27.89 per 1,000 patient days in 2003 to 3.43 per 1,000 patient days in 2007. The study claims that there were no medication errors that caused serious injury during the study.

What did they do? They coupled electronic prescription drug ordering with computer reporting of adverse events which, obviously, reduced medication errors.

Arguably, this was a soft playing field because improper medication and/or dosing with psychotropic drugs rarely causes serious injuries. But a victory is a victory and it is nice to see one of our local hospitals leading the charge on medication errors.

People wrestle hard with the question of whether to contact a malpractice lawyer about their potential claim? They might like their doctor, fear retribution... there are a whole host of considerations people undertake.

You would expect the malpractice lawyer's answer to be pick up the phone and find out if you have a malpractice case. But we get that it is not that easy. Nor should it be. A lot of very reasonable people have viable malpractice claims that they choose not to bring. This is not necessarily a bad choice. It is a deeply personal choice.

CNN provides today some balanced insight on the decision of whether to file a malpractice lawsuit.

Paul Luvera offers advice for lawyers in dealing with wrongful death cases. But I think it is also useful for all people in considering the feelings of survivors in death "cases."

I'm a big fan of the law of unintended consequences. Here's one: better medical care because of a bad economy.

Why? I'm glad you asked. The economic downturn has helped the quality of nursing. During good times, every nurse (and their mother) was selling real estate on the side or involved in some other economic opportunity that provided economic growth. So nursing vacancies were high. In today's economy, nurses are losing those opportunities and are retreating to the hospitals and nursing homes, which increased the number of full-time permanent nurses. This is cheaper for the hospitals and allows them to be choosier about the nurses they pick, immediately improving patient care.

Does a bad economy really decrease incidence of medical malpractice? I don't know. I'll leave that to the Freakanomics guys and their progeny. I just think this is interesting.

Who needs medical malpractice lawsuits? Anyone who is or could be a patient. This includes, ah, all of us.

Most doctors are not good doctors. Most doctors are great doctors. They are in the world's most prestigious profession for a reason: they are smart and competent. But, like any profession, there are a minority of doctors who are awful. Malpractice lawsuits would be at least less important if doctors properly policed themselves.

But they don't. State medical boards fail to discipline 55 percent of our doctors who are sanctioned by hospitals, according to a just released Public Citizen report. Think about that: their own hospital, where they presumably have contacts and relationships, saw fit to discipline them. But not the state's medical board.

The idea that doctors cannot police themselves is not a newsflash. More than a third of docs don't think they're responsible for reporting doctors who are not fit to practice medicine and only 69 percent of the docs who knew about an impaired or incompetent colleague did report them.

Can lawyers discipline themselves? No. We can't either. This is why we have legal malpractice lawsuits.

Explore Baltimore County writes about a bill introduced by a doctor who is in the Maryland House of Delegates that says, in effect, that if a doctor says he or she is 'sorry' for a medical outcome, that apology would be inadmissible in a Maryland courtroom.

I just looked for the bill. I couldn't find it. But how much do you want to bet me that that is not what "in effect" it says? Instead, if doctors explain exactly how the malpractice occurred and they deny it later, the fact that they have completely changed their story in front of perhaps multiple witnesses is excluded. How is that fair? The idea that the purpose of this bill is to allow doctors to say "Hey, I'm sorry for your loss" is just plain inaccurate.

There is no question in my mind that this bill is well intentioned. It sounds like such an obvious good idea. In fact, there is evidence that patients and their families benefit when doctors fess up and admit medical malpractice. So let's just move on. Let's go all George Bush and just go with our gut. Apology = good.

Or... let's be adults and think it through. Where is the study on how these same patients feel when these apologetic doctors admit to their patients what they did but then can make a farce of the victims and court by denying it later without reprisal? Presumably, they can commit perjury and contradict their previous statements without consequences.

Continue reading " Explore Baltimore County on Medical Malpractice " »

The year is just one-sixth of the way over but we already have some interesting medical malpractice opinions:

• Wantz v. Afzal
• Neustadter v. Holy Cross Hospital
• Muti v. University of Maryland Medical Systems
• Robertson v. Iuliano