The Nebraska Injury Law Report

Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman who was severely injured during an abortion at Planned Parenthood’s South Street clinic.

The suit was filed against Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs and Dr. Meryl Severson and alleges that on August 17th, a 40 year old woman went to the Planned Parenthood South Street Center in Lincoln, Nebraska for an abortion.

The Lincoln Journal Star story from Saturday, September 1^st:

Woman alleges medical malpractice after abortion
By CLARENCE MABIN / Lincoln Journal Star
Saturday, Sep 01, 2007 - 12:11:39 am CDT

A 40-year-old Nebraska woman said in a lawsuit filed Friday that she had an emergency hysterectomy because of a botched abortion at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Lincoln last month.

The woman, who is not named in the lawsuit, said she lost four liters of blood — the equivalent of 80 percent of the average woman’s blood volume, according to the lawsuit — and that the procedure caused her excruciating pain.

Lincoln attorney Jefferson Downing, who filed the lawsuit in Lancaster County District Court, as well as a complaint with the Nebraska Health and Human Services Department on behalf of the woman, said his client felt violated by the treatment she received at the clinic.

“Our client has filed these complaints to bring to light the negligent actions of Planned Parenthood and Dr. (Meryl) Severson,” Downing said in a prepared statement.

He said the woman is identified as Jane Roe in the lawsuit to protect her privacy. He declined to provide any information about her outside of statements in the complaint.

Downing has taken an active role in pro-life causes. In 2001, he was among a group of attorneys representing members of a pro-life group that staged pickets outside Westminster Presbyterian Church in Lincoln because Dr. Winston Crabb, a church elder, performed abortions in Lincoln and Omaha.

The picketers, members of Omaha-based Rescue the Heartland, raised a First Amendment challenge in U.S. District Court to a city ordinance on picketing.

On Friday, Downing downplayed the relevance of his personal views on abortion in regard to the Planned Parenthood lawsuit. He said the woman contacted his law firm through the Lincoln Yellow Pages.

The lawsuit names as defendants Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs and Dr. Meryl Severson of Omaha.

Chris Funk, president and chief operating officer for Planned Parenthood, said Friday she was unaware of the lawsuit and declined comment.

Severson could not be reached.

He resigned from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in March 2001 after performing an elective abortion in 2000 in violation of university policy. He joined Planned Parenthood in May 2001.

The plaintiff is claiming negligence and battery in the lawsuit, and is seeking $36,850 for past medical expenses and unspecified damages for physical pain and mental suffering, permanent injury and lost income.

Neither defendant is covered by protections under the Nebraska Hospital-Medical Liability Act, which sets limits on damage amounts, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, the woman was about eight weeks pregnant when she contacted Planned Parenthood in July and scheduled an abortion at the South Street Center.

The woman and a friend arrived at the clinic at 9 a.m. Aug. 17, and, according to the suit, the woman had an ultrasound, which indicated a tilted uterus.

After a wait of several hours, the woman was taken to an examination room and given an injection in her cervix, the lawsuit said. She then heard a suction sound, felt pressure in the uterus and “immediately complained of excruciating pain.”

When she told Severson and the attendants to stop, the suit said, the doctor replied, “We can’t stop.” Three employees then held the woman down while Severson completed the suction, according to the lawsuit.

Afterward, the woman felt sharp pain, nausea and was bleeding, the lawsuit said. While in the recovery area, her friend tried to help her to a bathroom, but she passed out, fell to the floor and suffered the first of three seizures, the lawsuit said.

Lincoln Fire and Rescue was dispatched to the clinic, and took her to BryanLGH Medical Center East.

A signed operative report from a physician at the hospital said the woman had experienced a “catastrophic perforation” of the uterus during the abortion. Downing provided a copy of the report in which the doctor’s name was blacked out.

Because of the “extensive nature of the trauma,” the report said, the physician summoned a second doctor and they performed an emergency hysterectomy on the woman. The doctors took photographs of the uterus to show the damage, according to the lawsuit.

“Had she not received emergency care when she did, it is my professional opinion that the patient could have hemorrhaged to death,” the doctor said in a signed summary provided by Downing.

The district court complaint is viewable here: complaint.pdf

If you have been injured due to medical malpractice, call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved, & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the “Contact Us” form in the upper left-hand portion of this page. Your first consultation is free.

Given the prevalence of heart disease, you should know the signs and symptoms of heart attack.  So should your medical provider or it could cost you–and them.

Every year in the United States, 7 million people go to hospital emergency rooms complaining of chest pain or other symptoms that suggest they might be having a heart attack. A missed heart attack diagnosis garners the highest malpractice payout among all medical malpractice cases.

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The statistics surrounding heart disease and heart attacks in the U.S. are startling. A heart attack occurs about every 20 seconds, and deaths from heart attacks occur approximately once a minute. Almost 14 million Americans have a history of heart attack or angina (chest pain or discomfort that occurs when your heart muscle does not get enough blood).

Shortness of breath, often occurring at the same time as chest pain but can occur before chest pain, also Chest discomfort/pain (squeezing, pressure, or fullness) Discomfort in other areas of the upper body (one or both arms, back, neck, jaw or stomach) Cold sweat, nausea, and light-headedness.

More than 233,000 women die each year from heart disease; yet, most women do not experience chest pain when having a heart attack. Instead, they frequently experience nausea and vomiting, which often leads doctors to misdiagnose a woman’s heart attack as a gastro-intestinal problem. According to recent studies, women waited an average of almost 25 minutes longer than men for clot-buster treatments, which can stop a heart attack. Misdiagnosing a heart attack or a heart condition puts the patient, female or male, at risk for stroke, paralysis and death.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, call the experienced medical malpractice attorneys of Keating, O’Gara, Nedved, & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the “Contact Us” form in the upper left-hand portion of this page.

Law.com reports that the use of electronic communications between doctor and pharmacy may help cut down on mistakes:

The widespread use of electronic systems to send prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies promises to prevent thousands of life-threatening medical errors, save billions of dollars in health care costs and even drive more business to drug stores.

Still, the vast majority of U.S. physicians have yet to adopt electronic prescribing, or e-prescribing, for the estimated 4 billion prescriptions they write annually, a situation that a phalanx of corporations and the government are working to change. One coalition promoting e-prescribing estimates that as many as 20 percent of the 550,000 practicing U.S. physicians had the technology to send e-prescriptions, but that only 5 percent actually have been using it.

With e-prescribing, physicians can use hand-held or desktop computers or “smart” mobile phones to send patient drug prescriptions to pharmacy computers.

Beyond conveying prescriptions, systems can alert doctors to potential drug interactions or dosing problems, eliminate handwriting errors, automate the time-consuming renewal process, provide data on a patient’s drug plan, and potentially cut thousands of pharmacy calls to doctors. Hospitals, insurers, technology companies, regional collaboratives and pharmacies have been working to advance adoption of e-prescribing.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Dr. Atul Gawande says that like all of us doctors make mistakes. Gawande is the bestselling author whose book “Complications” inspired the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.” From an article in The Guardian

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications - his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy - and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical mistake, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

The Washington Post is reporting that:

“The vast majority of potentially harmful errors in chemotherapy for children with cancer do find their way to these young patients, a new study finds. And they are more often caused by dispensing or administration mistakes than by prescribing mix-ups, the researchers found.”

“In total,” the Post reports, “85 percent of these drug errors were not spotted until the child received the medication, according to a study led by Dr. Marlene Miller, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. These errors do not always cause harm to the child, the authors added, but they are always worrisome.”

As expected, human error accounts for the vast majority of these types of medical mistakes:

Surprisingly, prescribing errors accounted for just one in 10 cases. Most errors (48 percent) involved mistakes in administration, followed by errors in dispensing (30 percent). The most commonly cited types of error were mistakes in dose or quantity (23 percent), or time of administration (23 percent), followed by omission errors (that is, failing to deliver the drug at all, 14 percent) and improper administration technique or route (12 percent). By far the biggest cause of error was “performance deficit” — human error — at 41 percent.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

The U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs recently announced the completion of a major study in 7 states that debunks the myth that there is a “medical malpractice crisis.”

The study found that, “The majority of medical malpractice claims . . .were closed without any compensation paid to those claiming a medical injury.”

The Bureau conducted a study of medical malpractice insurance claims that were closed from 2000 through 2004 in Florida, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada and Texas. These states were identified as having comprehensive medical malpractice insurance claims databases, some of which extended back to the early 1990s.

An examination of closed medical malpractice insurance claims allows for a broad overview of some of the key issues associated with medical malpractice. About one-third of the medical malpractice insurance claims closed in Maine, Missouri and Nevada resulted in a payout. In Illinois only about 12 percent of closed claims ended in a payout.

So much for the much hyped medical malpractice “crisis.” The facts speak for themselves.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical malpractice, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

A San Diego jury awarded a man and his wife $5.7 million in damages this week for his doctor’s failure to timely diagnose skin cancer. But the couple won’t collect anywhere near that amount. Under California law, the verdict will be reduced to $1.9 million.

That is because California, like Nebraska, has a cap on medical malpractice damages. Nebraska Revised Statute Section 44-2825 limits a plaintiff’s right to medical malpractice damages to a statutory total of $1.75 million. The cap has been challenged several times but, to date, the Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the cap is constitutional.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical malpractice, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

From USA Today:

Only about one-third of hospitals provide emergency care to heart attack patients quickly enough to meet scientific guidelines for saving lives . . . Even top performers meet American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology (ACC) guidelines for care in only half their cases, researchers say.

“Even among the better hospitals, only a few hospitals routinely meet the recommended guidelines,” says Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, a leader of the research team and an architect of a national campaign launched Sunday to help hospitals improve their performance. “By next year, we’re going to change that.”

About 200,000 people a year have heart attacks caused by blockages in crucial arteries supplying the heart with blood. About 10,000 patients die of these heart attacks in hospitals each year.

Read the full article here.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical negligence, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Though it almost goes without saying, medication errors can have serious consequences for patients. A study entitled “Drug Complications in Outpatients” revealed a dramatic increase in medication errors that cost patients their lives.

By reviewing death certificates from over a ten year timeframe, researchers found that there had been a 2.5 fold increase in medication errors that led to patient deaths. The study found:

Over 100,000 fatal adverse drug events (ADEs) were estimated to have occurred in 1994, placing it high among leading causes of death. One million outpatients in the United States are hospitalized with ADEs and 4.7% of hospital admissions are attributed to ADEs. Of all ADEs, 28% are considered preventable.”.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medication error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

There is a good article out today that discusses medical malpractice and what to do about it.

The article recounts that, “As many as 80,000 people die in the United States each year due partly to medical malpractice, according to a study entitled “Patients, Doctors and Lawyers: Medical Injury, Malpractice Litigation, and Patient Compensation in New York,” published by the Harvard Medical Practice Study.

Despite the high number of deaths and injuries, the article states that, “Only about 2 percent of those injured by physicians’ negligence seek compensation through a lawsuit, according to a 1991 article in the New England Journal of Medicine.”

If you or a loved one have suffered medical malpractice, the article recommends that you talk to a lawyer to help you sort through the complexities of the case, and to determine if you have a case worth pursuing in court.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical malpractice, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.