10 Facts About Medical Malpractice

1. The most prevalent hospital medical malpractice conditions are:

• Medication errors
• Medical errors
• Infections
• Hospital Acquired Injuries
• Objects retained during surgery
• Post-surgical infections
• Pressure Ulcers/ Bed Sores

2.  Pressure Ulcers, Hospital Injuries, Objects left in from Surgery and Infections, account for one out of six hospital malpractice claims.

3. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will no longer reimburse for 8 specific hospital-acquired conditions. CMS has ruled that these ‘never events’ are all “reasonably preventable”. As a result, if a ‘never event’ occurs one could argue the hospital is strictly liable, meaning there are little or no defenses to those claims.

Those medical complications no longer reimbursed are:

• Objects Left in Surgery;
• Air Embolism;
• Blood Incompatibility;
• Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections
• Pressure Ulcers – Bed Sores;
• Vascular Catheter-Associated Infection
• Surgical Site Infection
• Hospital Acquired Injuries, including fractures, dislocations, intracranial injury, crushing injury, and burns.

4.  Preventable medical errors kill and seriously injure hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. If the Centers for Disease Control were to include preventable medical errors as a category, it would be the sixth leading cause of death in America.

5.  Two-thirds of doctors who make 10 or more medical negligence payments are never disciplined at all. Nearly half of all U.S. hospitals have never reported a disciplinary action against one of their doctors since a National Practitioner Databank was established.

6.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that there were 181,000 severe injuries attributable to medical negligence in 2003.

7.  The Institute for Healthcare Improvement estimates there are 15 million incidents of medical harm each year. HealthGrades, the nation’s leading healthcare rating organization, found that Medicare patients who experienced a patient-safety incident had a one-in-five chance of dying as a result.

8.  People have been led to believe that there are hundreds of thousands of medical negligence lawsuits every year and only a handful of genuine medical errors. In reality, the reverse is true. There are very few medical negligence lawsuits, and hundreds of thousands dying from preventable medical errors.

9.   A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 70 percent of patients who experience medical errors are not told by their doctors.

10. A national survey from Columbia University’s Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) similarly found that nearly one half of the nation’s doctors failed to report incompetence or medical errors.

Learn more about Medical Malpractice and about Alan Sackrin