Do you know of anyone that died because of Hospital or Doctor error?

[WhyNot]

@Shmendrik

I’m pretty sure that any hospital in America which gets money from Medicare (in other words, just about all of them) is required to do that. If you find yourself in a hospital where you have to insist that they do a time-out prior to surgery, I’d advise you to find a different hospital. Also, the site must be previously marked by the surgeon outside of the OR, not during the timeout.

The VA is supposed to, but in the last 4 surgeries, didn’t 3 times until the patient (my husband) called for it. Lovely, eh?

Yes, everyone is supposed to, but everyone doesn’t, and that’s why errors happen. I want patients to know what’s supposed to happen, so that at least the person with the most at stake knows what’s supposed to happen.

And yes, I’m sorry the ordering of those sentences made it appear as though I was saying the marking was part of the timeout. It should be done earlier. Often it isn’t. And too often, it’s done with marker that’s alcohol soluble. Big f’ing oops there. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcpc1007085?viewType=Print& (That case study wasn’t fatal. The one I just had to write a paper on was, but I can’t find it outside of a paywall.)

[GreenElf]

@aceplace57

Doctors and Hospitals do a great job and improve people’s lives most of the time. The US health system is the best in the world. The error rate is very low.

Thanks, just what I needed to hear. Actually I’m posting post-op here, and seem to be doing fine.

[Shmendrik]

@WhyNot

The VA is supposed to, but in the last 4 surgeries, didn’t 3 times until the patient (my husband) called for it. Lovely, eh?

Yes, everyone is supposed to, but everyone doesn’t, and that’s why errors happen. I want patients to know what’s supposed to happen, so that at least the person with the most at stake knows what’s supposed to happen.

And yes, I’m sorry the ordering of those sentences made it appear as though I was saying the marking was part of the timeout. It should be done earlier. Often it isn’t. And too often, it’s done with marker that’s alcohol soluble. Big f’ing oops there. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcpc1007085?viewType=Print& (That case study wasn’t fatal. The one I just had to write a paper on was, but I can’t find it outside of a paywall.)

I stand by my advice then, especially as you’ve exhibited a great knowledge of many of the fine hospitals in the Chicagoland area.

By the way, I generally make sure to tell patients about the timeout before they go into the OR, or they might be alarmed when the OR nurse or surgeon unexpectedly asks them who they are and why they are there.

[WhyNot]

@Shmendrik

I generally make sure to tell patients about the timeout before they go into the OR, or they might be alarmed when the OR nurse or surgeon unexpectedly asks them who they are and why they are there.

HA! I never thought of that.

[Nava]

While not a direct cause of death, my father’s cancer was misdiagnosed. Lung cancer in a smoker, evidently it’s primary, right? Your fault for smoking, right? He worked in a hospital (admin), I’ve been on a first-name basis with the doctors who treated him since he started that job, they know me, and a few times I’ve been told by them and others I’m “an honor to your uncle” who was famous for his diagnostic ability. I’m not a doctor or a nurse, the only hospital work I’ve done was a short “stage” in that hospital’s lab.

Patient gets declared cured.

Checkups discover cancerous cells in pleura, do not discover lump in lungs. More chemo. During chemo, lump is found in lungs. More chemo.

Gets declared cured.

Checkups discover cancerous cells in pleura, do not discover lump in lungs. More chemo? Patient says “Jesus Christ, am I allowed to say ‘fuck this’?” Doctors discuss with family. Wife doesn’t want to hear anything. Daughter says “are you even sure it’s lung cancer? I mean, is there such a thing as cancer of the pleural sac? It’s the second time you find cells in the pleura but no lump.” Doctors’ eyes go large as dinner plates. Exclamations along the lines of “oh fuck” are not heard, because doctors on duty are not supposed to say such things in front of patients’ families.

Protocol for cases of lung cancer gets changed - cases currently under treatment are already subject to new protocol.

10 years later, sister of previous patient gets lung cancer. Smoker. Investigate further, according to protocol. Mesothelioma, linked to asbestos, no known link to smoking. While she’s also probably going to die from it, at least the treatment she’s getting is better focused and she doesn’t count as “patient’s fault cancer”.

Mind you, I may still have Words with my brother and sister in law one of these days, because it pisses me off that apparently they’re telling their children that it’s their Grandpa James’ fault he’s dead. Hopefully it will happen in their house so I can go get my SiL’s Onco book, look for mesothelioma and make her read the entry out loud.

Childhood friend. Had pregnancy (tends to happen to married women in good health, with husbands also in good health). Pregnancy goes well. Delivery goes well, but it takes place in a day which seems to have been chosen by half the pregnant women in the area. ObGyn floor is full, so mother gets given a room in trauma (an area which, despite its name, tends to be quite tranquil). Mother is having horrible headaches. Mother is given aspirin. Family finds out there is something called Reye’s syndrome The headaches came from bleeding in the brain, the aspirin made the bleeding worse.

Hospital will pay for little girl’s education, up to and including one Masters’ and one Doctorate. Protocols get changed, cross-specialty training protocols get updated, “when you’re treating someone outside your specialty, you can’t use the routines that are OK for your specialty” becomes part of the list of slogans printed on local healthcare system’s calendars, notebooks, etc.

[GreenElf]

@Shmendrik

By the way, I generally make sure to tell patients about the timeout before they go into the OR, or they might be alarmed when the OR nurse or surgeon unexpectedly asks them who they are and why they are there.

Good idea. Otherwise, the patient has to wonder if you have so many patients you just lost them in the shuffle.

[Chronos]

I had a cousin who died at birth because of the inept way the doctor tried to “induce labor”. I don’t recall all of the details, though.

[Saturn_Dreams]

My aunt was going to a local doctor in a rural area of Japan where she lived to get some chest pains checked out. After a year of going to the doctor with no result and the pain getting worse, she finally went to a hospital in the city where she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was too late to do anything by then as the cancer had metastasized and she died shortly after at the age of 31.

[needscoffee]

Andy Warhol was killed by incompetent care after his gall bladder removal surgery.
From The NYTimes:

Andy Warhol – anemic, undernourished and fearful of hospitals – slipped into a coma after surgery and died virtually unattended because his doctors overloaded him with fluids, a lawyer for his estate said yesterday in opening arguments in a wrongful death suit.
The lawyer, Bruce Clark, said that New York Hospital negligently pumped more than twice the required volume of fluids into Mr. Warhol when he underwent gallbladder surgery five years ago and that the resulting internal pressure caused his death from heart failure. <snip>

Mr. Clark said that Mr. Warhol had suffered gallbladder attacks for years but that he was so fearful of hospitals and physically frail that he and Dr. Cox kept putting off surgery until the condition became so acute that several surgeons and doctors agreed that removing the organ was the only option.
“He was 5 feet 11 inches tall but he only weighed 128 pounds,” Mr. Clark said. He was anemic and undernourished, but his doctor said in his admitting papers that he was in “good” health. “His undernourished body had a capacity of from 3 to 4 quarts of blood,” he continued, “but they kept pumping fluids into him without making sure anything was coming out and then they increased the intake.”
At the same time, he said Mr. Warhol was given morphine, a painkilling drug that further supressed his pulmonary capacity.
“His heart eventually weakened and weakened as more fluids were poured into his veins,” he said.
“At his autopsy, a doctor gave his weight at 150 pounds,” Mr. Clark said. “His lungs were filled with fluids and his trachea brimmed with a pinkish froth.”

They essentially drowned him. The suit was settled during trial before it went to jury.

[SciFiSam]

Not death, but I know of one kid who has cerbral palsy due to mistakes at birth (proven in court with a big settlement) and I’ve always suspected that my daughter’s autism is due to the almost-identical mistakes at her birth causing her to have breathing difficulties that were ignored for four hours during labour and then needing to be resuscitated when she was born, and not responding or more than four minutes. In that case it was a midwife’s fault - midwives in the UK are fully-qualified nurses, with additional training btw - for simply never once checking the readout.

My father also died, eventually, due to complications that arose after he contracted MRSA in hospital. Again, not a doctor exactly, but a hospital error. It was at a period when MRSA infection rates increased hugely in the UK due to the govt of the time requiring all hospitals to outsource their cleaning staff, who were then not properly supervised.

[grude]

My post will probably be bizarre but I have had unusual life experiences so…

My MIL mysteriously wasted away, it got to the point she could not eat or drink. At the public hospital they would put her on a feeding tube and she would get well enough to yank it out, and then slowly go downhill again. This was over months and more than a year even, finally right before she died they did an MRI FINALLY and found she had had a series of strokes. And the parts of her brain that controlled swallowing and walking among other things were necrotic. f the public hospital had just done a damn MRI to start with they would have known, instead they kept sending her for like six HIV tests that all came back negative.

My wife’s niece had sickle cell anemia and either the public hospital doctors told her parents she was cured, or they misunderstood. But even in the USA doctors did not explain it to them, so she kept having sickle events. Died of a stroke at age 18.

*If you can avoid the public health care system in Trinidad, do so.

[t5oy]

Back in 2006 my dad experienced chest pain and pain in his jaw. (Heart attack right) most of us know. He went to the ER via ambulance and spent most of the day in the ER and was given Ativan. Towards the end of the day the ER doc said he was merely experiencing anxiety due to a new job he started about two weeks prior. My mom went to pick him up from the ER to take him home and he died of a heart attack on the car ride home! Needless to say we sued their asses off but it took about 6 years before the hospital settled. To this day the hospital and doctor have still never admitted to any wrongdoing.

[iiandyiiii]

My grandfather died about 20 years ago in the hospital. He was having a somewhat minor procedure and was given a shot of cortisone to reduce swelling. He was allergic to cortisone, which the doctor should have known (it was in his medical records).

My grandmother, my father, and his siblings decided not to sue the hospital because of how unpleasant they assumed such a lawsuit would be. My dad said something to the effect of “I don’t want to sit in court for a month listening to some asshole tell me how little daddy’s life was worth”.

[RivkahChaya]

@Nava

Childhood friend. Had pregnancy (tends to happen to married women in good health, with husbands also in good health). Pregnancy goes well. Delivery goes well, but it takes place in a day which seems to have been chosen by half the pregnant women in the area. ObGyn floor is full, so mother gets given a room in trauma (an area which, despite its name, tends to be quite tranquil). Mother is having horrible headaches. Mother is given aspirin. Family finds out there is something called Reye’s syndrome The headaches came from bleeding in the brain, the aspirin made the bleeding worse.

Was this in the 1960s? When I was pregnant, I wasn’t allowed near an aspirin, or ibuprofen, or any NSAID, because of the possibility of placental hemorrhage. What hospital gives a pregnant woman, especially one in labor, an aspirin?

[Loach]

My grandfather died of peritonitis due to a misdiagnosed perforated ulcer. My grandmother could have received a big settlement but as usual she backed away from any sort of confrontation except with her own family.

A soldier I deployed with and was die to deploy with again died while getting her wisdom teeth out. I heard it was a reaction to the anesthesia. I don’t know if it was an error or unavoidable.

[slalexan]

My mother had fundiplication (sp?) surgery for severe acid reflux. The reflux was so bad, it damaged her vocal chords and made it so that she could barely speak. She went through the normal process of finding a surgeon and went with the one recommended by her doctor. Unfortunately, this surgeon wasn’t terribly experienced and did a horrible job of it. She made the opening to my mother’s stomach too small and damaged her vagus nerve. For the next year, my mother lost weight rapidly (she was overweight to begin with) and was in and out of the hospital for malnutrition and dehydration. It took a long time before anyone realized what was wrong. They prescribed benzos and opioid medications to “calm” her stomach so that she could absorb nutrients from it. It only sort of worked and she ended up addicted.

In the end, she was able to learn how to eat food again though she is not the same. She’s broken her addiction to benzos and painkillers and is still very very thin. I wonder what would have happened if she had seen someone more qualified.

My grandma died a horrible, painful death while under the care of a nursing home attached to a hospital. It wasn’t really the hospital’s fault though. My grandma had fallen out of her chair and broken her hip. She laid on the floor in horrible pain for the better part of the dayshift before anyone came to investigate her cries. Then, they just popped her back in her chair and sought no medical attention for her. She sat on her broken hip for nearly a week until the nursing home finally sent her to the hospital. She died in the hospital due to complications of the untreated fracture.

[Nava]

@RivkahChaya

Was this in the 1960s? When I was pregnant, I wasn’t allowed near an aspirin, or ibuprofen, or any NSAID, because of the possibility of placental hemorrhage. What hospital gives a pregnant woman, especially one in labor, an aspirin?

In the nils and the problem was with her being in the trauma unit due to lack of beds in ObGyn, postpartum. The trauma unit’s nurses gave her the generic painkiller they usually gave to their own patients when there were no others indicated in their charts and never thought of consulting someone from ObGyn. Her kid is now in primary school.

Just for extra giggles, this was in the hospital which was considered the best teaching school in Spain pretty much since it was founded until about now; currently they’re considered one of the best two (and very irritated that Granada is climbing all over them).

[WhyNot]

I haven’t seen an aspirin outside of cardiac use in decades! What where they thinking?!

[Doctor_Jackson]

@WhyNot

I know you’re trying to make GreenElf feel better, but false reassurances are still false.

440,000 people die of medical mistakes in hospitals every year. Tens of thousands more die from medical mistakes outside of hospitals. It’s the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Compared to the rest of the world, we’re about average.

To be fair, according to this site, which references the same study, about 25% (106,000) of those deaths were due to “non-error adverse effects from medications”. One can’t really fault the hospital for that - all medicines have side effects. Subtracting those from the 440,000 total leaves 334,000 deaths attributable to hospital error, unecessary surgery, hospital infection and medication errors. Out of 51.4 million annual hosptital medical procedures, that is a rate of .002%.

Given those numbers, I don’t think the reassurance was “false” by any stretch. Medical error can and should be reduced, no doubt, but death from medical error in the US is rare.

[WhyNot]

@Doctor_Jackson

To be fair, according to this site, which references the same study, about 25% (106,000) of those deaths were due to “non-error adverse effects from medications”. One can’t really fault the hospital for that - all medicines have side effects. Subtracting those from the 440,000 total leaves 334,000 deaths attributable to hospital error, unecessary surgery, hospital infection and medication errors. Out of 51.4 million annual hosptital medical procedures, that is a rate of .002%.

Given those numbers, I don’t think the reassurance was “false” by any stretch. Medical error can and should be reduced, no doubt, but death from medical error in the US is rare.

I think counting as a percentage of “procedures” is cheating, to be honest. A person in the hospital for three days may have dozens of “procedures,” depending on who’s doing the billing. And when things go screwy, more procedures are often needed to try to fix that, further diluting the ratio. I think it would be more honest to look at it as A) the ranking in terms of total deaths annually or B) per hospitalization, with perhaps allowances made for long term care.

At least according to the systems theory which they’re making me study at the moment (kill me now), even things like wrong site surgery are rarely the result of one error, but several simultaneously (overbooked schedule makes everyone rushed, wrong marker used, surgeon skips time out, nurse is too scared to correct the surgeon even though he’s pretty sure she’s operating on the wrong knee…is this one error or four? I’d argue four, but I bet it’s recorded as one.)

Not to mention the thousands more medical errors which result in near misses, injury but not deaths, prolong the need for medical care or contribute to death or decline without themselves being fatal. Not what was asked in this thread, but further evidence that the risk of an error happening to a person during their hospitalization is higher than they think. Certainly higher than it *should *be.