PritzkerOlsen, P.A. is actively investigating possible claims of medical malpractice in the surgical removal of leads for implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators.

It is a frequent occurrence for heart leads to eventually wear out or fail. Therefore, a physician must decide whether to remove the old lead before placing a new lead or simply leave the old lead in place. Removal of an old lead is a very difficult and challenging procedure because the lead may have become overgrown with fibrous tissue and therefore stuck inside a major blood vessel. Extracting the lead can be dangerous but leaving it in place can make it more difficult to remove later because of the growth of fibrous tissue.

Removing a lead is typically challenging because of the growth of this fibrous tissue. Therefore, it is important that a physician be well trained. The Heart Rhythm Society, a group representing doctors who implant heart devices, plans to issue guidelines about lead extractions later this year. The Society is expected to urge doctors to perform at least 30 removals under the supervision of an experienced extraction surgeon before operating solo. This is because there is a very long and difficult “learning curve” for the removal of these devices which is often done with laser. This is known as “laser lead extraction.”

Common manufacturers are Medtronic, St. Jude, and Boston Scientific. One of the most common leads is the Sprint Fidelis lead manufactured by Medtronic.

If you or a loved one have been the victim of complications during a cardiac lead extraction, please contact Elliot Olsen or Fred Pritzker for a free consultation: 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or submit our free consultation form.

CONTACT OUR LAW FIRM ABOUT PATIENT COMPENSATION FOR
CARDIAC LEAD EXTRACTION MALPRACTICE >

News Articles:

• Barry Meier, Removing Medtronic Heart Cables is Hard Choice, New York Times, April 6, 2009.
• Barry Meier, Medtronic Links Device for Heart to 13 Deaths, New York Times, March 13, 2009.
• Barry Meier, Medtronic Dispute Shows Need for Device Registry, New York Times, February 26, 2009.
• Barry Meier, Study Finds More Failure of Heart Device, New York Times, February 23, 2009.
• Barry Meier, Lawmakers Seek Right to Return Right to Sue Device Makers, New York Times, February 20, 2009.

Labels: heart surgery malpractice, malpractice attorney

A baby at Boston Medical Center was administered the wrong dose of morphine and became ill, according to the Boston Herald. According to the story, the father of the baby was told that a nurse had accidentally “overdosed” the baby with morphine. Boston Medical Center issued a statement acknowledging a medication error involving an infant March 14.

When a nurse administers the wrong dose of a medication, it is negligence—nurse malpractice.

In nurse malpractice cases, the hospital is generally sued because it is legally responsible for work-related negligent behavior of hospital nurses. This is important, because the hospital has the resources and insurance coverage necessary to adequately compensate the injured patient.

If you or a loved one has been the victim of nurse malpractice, contact our law firm and tell us your story. If you decide to hire us, we will thoroughly investigate your case, hire necessary medical experts and take all measures necessary to help you obtain the compensation you deserve.

To contact a lawyer at PritzkerOlsen, please call 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or submit our free consultation form.

Keywords: Nurse malpractice, lawyer for morphine overdose, hospital malpractice, wrong dose of morphine.

Reference: Jessica Fargen, Baby medical mixup: Newborn OK after morphine gaffe at Boston Medical Center, Boston Herald, March 20, 2009.

Labels: medical malpractice lawyer, nurse malpractice, wrong dose

A recent study published in Pediatrics reviewed 960 randomly selected charts from 12 children's hospitals. The study found 107 unique adverse drug events, which, broken down, included 11.1 adverse drug events per 100 patients, 15.7 per 1000 patient-days, and 1.23 per 1000 medication doses.

According to the study, “Twenty-two percent of all adverse drug events were deemed preventable, 17.8% could have been identified earlier, and 16.8% could have been mitigated more effectively. The most common medication classes causing adverse drug events were opioids/ analgesics (51%) and antibiotics, and the most common stages of the medication management process associated with preventable adverse drug events were monitoring and prescribing/ordering.” The highest rate of adverse drug events per patient occurred in the hematology/oncology units.

Opioid analgesics include morphine, codeine, fentanyl and other pain medications. The risk is pain medication overdose. There are several reasons for this including:

1. The increased difficulty of calculating dosages of pain medication for children
2. Failure to adequately monitor the patient
3. The dangerous nature of these medications
   

These are extremely dangerous drugs and a small error in administration of these drugs can result in serious injury or death. There are also situations where the pain medication has adulterations or other defects that cause injury. For example, in the last few months, FDA has announced a number of recalls and health alerts involving fentanyl.

If your child experienced serious injury or death after being administered a pain medication or any medication in a hospital, you should contact a medical malpractice lawyer immediately. To contact attorney Fred Pritzker, managing attorney for our medical malpractice cases, for information on medication overdose lawsuits, please call 1-888-377-8900 (toll-free) or submit our free case consultation form.

Article: "Development, Testing, and Findings of a Pediatric-Focused Trigger Tool to Identify Medication-Related Harm in US Children's Hospitals,"Glenn S. Takata, MDa,b, Wilbert Mason, MD, MPHc, Carol Taketomo, PharmDe, Tina Logsdon, MSf and Paul J. Sharek, MD, MPHg, PEDIATRICS, Vol. 121 No. 4, April 2008, pp. e927-e935.

Labels: children's health, medication error, pain medication overdose

A recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine assessed the extent to which care processes recommended for pediatric outpatients are delivered by analyzing the medical records of 1536 children. The results were not encouraging:

On average, according to data in the medical records, children in the study received 46.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 44.5 to 48.4) of the indicated care. They received 67.6% (95% CI, 63.9 to 71.3) of the indicated care for acute medical problems, 53.4% (95% CI, 50.0 to 56.8) of the indicated care for chronic medical conditions, and 40.7% (95% CI, 38.1 to 43.4) of the indicated preventive care.

Quality varied according to the clinical area, with the rate of adherence to indicated care ranging from 92.0% (95% CI, 89.9 to 94.1) for upper respiratory tract infections to 34.5% (95% CI, 31.0 to 37.9) for preventive services for adolescents.
Deficits in the quality of care provided to children appear to be similar in magnitude to those previously reported for adults. Strategies to reduce these apparent deficits are needed. (Quote from below-referenced article, "The Quality of Ambulatory Care Delivered to Children in the United States")

Poor medical care for children is unacceptable. Now that we know children are at risk, we need to find why their care is not adequate and fix the problems. Continuing medical education, a requirement for maintaining a medical license, should have mandatory courses on juvenile health. Also, agreed-upon basic guidelines for care need to be established, and federal and state governments need to make sure this basic care is paid for by public or private insurance.
For a number of reasons it is in our country’s best interests to care for our children. For those who can’t think beyond their pocketbook, adequate medical care for our children now will prevent future medical expenses when they become adults.

If you suspect that your child received inadequate medical care and was seriously injured as a result, please contact a medical malpractice attorney at Pritzker | Olsen. Attorneys Fred Pritzker and Elliot Olsen have been named “Super Lawyers” by Law & Politics magazine. For a free consultation, call 1-888-377-8900 (toll-free) or submit our free case consultation form.

Article: "The Quality of Ambulatory Care Delivered to Children in the United States,"
Rita Mangione-Smith, M.D., M.P.H., Alison H. DeCristofaro, M.P.H., Claude M. Setodji, Ph.D., Joan Keesey, B.A., David J. Klein, M.S., John L. Adams, Ph.D., Mark A. Schuster, M.D., Ph.D., and Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Ph.D., The New England Journal of Medicine, October 11, 2007, Volume 257: 1515-1523.

Labels: children's health, medical malpractice lawyer

Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, reported that it removed a healthy kidney from a patient instead of the patient’s cancerous kidney.

The hospital did not notice that the mistake until a day after the surgery when a pathologist noticed the kidney taken from the patient was healthy.

Minnesota law requires hospitals to report adverse health events, including “wrong-site” surgeries (Minn. Stat. Section 144.7065, Subdivision 2 (1)). Last year, 24 wrong-site surgeries were reported to the Minnesota Department of Health in accordance with this law.

In the four-and-a-half years that state as been assembling data, "I don't know if we've ever had a wrong organ removal," said Diane Rydrych, assistant director of the state's division of health policy.

Ryrdrych says most hospitals have safety measures in place to prevent wrong-site surgery, including marking body parts to be operated on in advance of surgery and requiring a "time out" in the operating room to give surgical staff a chance to double check documentation and voice any concerns.

"I would say that these events are always preventable or almost always preventable" said Rydrych. (KARE 11 interview)

Certainly, this tragic loss of a healthy kidney could have been prevented. To contact a surgery malpractice lawyer at our law firm, please call toll-free at 1-888-377-8900, email Fred Pritzker, or submit the firm’s free case consultation form.

Posted March 2008.

Labels: Methodist Hospital, surgery malpractice, wrong kidney

Methadone is a strong opioid-based pain medication. According to Pain Treatment Topics (www.pain-topics.org), methadone overdoses and deaths have increased. Some of these incidences are associated with medical malpractice. Possible problems may be:

• Prescribing the wrong dosage of methadone
  
• Prescribing methadone without taking into consideration other medications the patient is taking and how those medication will interact with the methadone
• Methadone overdose due to nurse error or the error of another medical professional
  

Death or serious injury due to methadone overdose should be discussed with an experienced medical malpractice attorney.

Posted March 2008.

Labels: malpractice attorney, methadone, overdose

Pritzker | Olsen attorneys Fred Pritzker and Elliot Olsen recently secured a $950,000 recovery on behalf of a young man who developed septic arthritis eight days following knee surgery. The suit alleged that the doctors responsible for his care failed to recognize, test and treat his knee infection. Experts retained on behalf of the young man offered evidence that the doctors failed to diagnose septic arthritis, failed to perform arthrocentesis, failed to open the knee capsule and drain out and remove infected fluid and tissue and failed to place the patient on IV antibiotics.

Our client later required massive skin grafting to cover the large leg wound that resulted from the infection. As a result of the damage to the articular cartilage in his knee, the young man will experience pain and increasing disability that will lead to extensive future treatment including knee replacement and perhaps above-the-knee amputation. Read more about the recovery for failure to diagnose septic arthritis.

Posted February 2008.

Labels: failure to diagnose septic arthritis, malpractice lawsuit, septic arthritis