From the August 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“We take on those cases where there has been serious injury that was brought about by negligent acts by physicians and health care providers,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s a simple error and sometimes it’s inattention, but most of the cases are simple negligence where there is an error made unintentionally.”
Eldredge recalls a recent case where he represented a Colorado woman whose baby developed a serious birth defect as a result of the physician’s failure to timely deliver the baby who was showing signs fetal distress.

“The doctor ignored signs of distress even though nurses were pushing to get the baby delivered,” says Eldredge. “The doctor said, ‘No, let’s let labor take its course’ and the baby was born with cerebral palsy and will never walk or function normally.”
He says his firm settled the case for millions of dollars—“enough to take care of child for the rest of his life.”

Ending wrong-site mistakes
One major component of hospital errors is the occurrence of “wrong-site surgeries.” Wrong-site surgery includes invasive procedures done on the wrong patient as well as the wrong procedure, wrong site and wrong side. Mistakes that have occurred in the past include amputating the wrong leg, performing the wrong operation or removing a kidney from the wrong patient.

These types of wrong-site surgeries are considered so blatant and avoidable that they were given their own classification as “never events.” The term was introduced in 2001 by Dr. Ken Kizer, former CEO of the National Quality Forum, to describe medical errors that should never occur. Over time, the “never event” list has been expanded to include 28 errors, such as delays in treatment, leaving a foreign object in a patient after surgery and medication errors.

The Joint Commission for Transforming Healthcare, the Chicago-based group that accredits the nation’s hospitals, reported this June that despite efforts to prevent wrong-site surgeries from happening, they still occur about 40 times each week—more than 2,000 times a year—in hospitals and clinics across the country. Last year, 93 cases were reported to the Commission, compared with 49 in 2004.

In most states, reporting wrong-site surgeries to the Commission is voluntary as well as confidential—to encourage doctors and hospitals to come forward and to make improvements, officials say.

“While wrong-site surgery is not an everyday occurrence, all facilities and physicians who perform invasive procedures are at some degree of risk,” Joint Commission President, Dr. Mark R. Chassin, said on a June conference call on the organization’s Wrong Site Surgery Project. “The magnitude of this risk is often unknown or undefined. Providers who ignore this fact, or rely on the absence of such events in the past as a guarantee of future safety, do so at their peril.”

August 2011 Magazine

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