How to Avoid a Potential Lawsuit
Potential lawsuits are a reality that even the best physicians must accept. An American Medical...
lawsuit
Top 10 Specialties Sued: 2013 Malpractice Report
Nearly 1,400 physicians who were sued for medical malpractice share their experience in Medscape’s...
Most Docs Practice Defensive Medicine
You may have missed this when it first appeared. Experts from Harvard and the University of Southern California say assumptions made by some analysts that defensive medicine is not an important facet of the high cost of...
Time Spent on Unresolved Malpractice Claims
The average physician in the United States spends nearly 11% of a 40-year career with an unresolved, open malpractice claim, according to a study from American researchers. The authors recommend that malpractice reform efforts...
The “Second Victims” in Nursing
Tears rolled down my face as I came across an article written 2 years ago. A veteran pediatric nurse took her own life several months after administering a fatal overdose of an electrolyte to an infant. After investigations and...
Unnecessary Pre-Op Tests & Evidence-Based Guidelines
Another paper on the subject of unnecessary preoperative laboratory testing appeared not long ago. A group from the University of Texas Medical Branch looked at more than 73,000 elective hernia repairs in the National Surgical...
Jury Duty? I’ll Gladly Serve
Not long ago, I was called for jury duty. Although I was busy, I consider jury duty to be part of my civic responsibility and I did not try to avoid it. Well, another reason is that in my state, it is just about impossible to...
Why Malpractice Claims Take Forever To Be Resolved
Two recent papers have prompted me to ask myself the question, “Why do malpractice suits take so long to be resolved?” One was by a group from Harvard, USC and the RAND Corporation. They looked at more than 10,000 closed...
Physician Decision-Making: Damned If You Do…
Here’s a little story from the early days of my first job as a chairman of surgery. Shortly after I assumed the role of surgical chairman in a community teaching hospital at the ripe old age of 40, and having absolutely no...
An Error Occurred. Suspend All Surgery in the U.S.?
Here is an extreme “system error” type of response to an event that seems to have been a human error. According to CBS News: “Mowing at all national parks has been suspended indefinitely because of safety concerns after a...
Malpractice Trends: Good & Bad News for Docs
Recent data on medical malpractice claims showed both good and bad news for physicians – but even...
Most Physicians Eventually Sued for Malpractice
While the risk of being sued for malpractice can range from 2.6% for psychiatrists to almost 20%...
