Medical Error Accountability | Seattle Personal Injury Law Firm

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Working as a Seattle personal injury lawyer and Kent car accident attorney I strongly believe in accountability for individuals or companies actions. Without accountability millions of people would be suffering vast medical expenses at the hands of a negligent individuals and chaos would ensue. This sense of accountability, however, should not end with those causing serious injury or death in auto accidents, but also causing injury through medical error. Seattle Children’s Hospital has come under much scrutiny in recent months for a string of medical errors leading to death and serious injury, but the hospital has shown great pose in admitting to the problems rather than ignoring and denying them like so many other hospitals.

The most recent mishap ended in the serious injury of 2-year-old Osman Ali who suffered severe brain damage when his angioplasty went wrong. The young boy suffers from pulmonary stenosis a heart condition which constricts the body’s blood flow. The angioplasty surgery was being performed on the right side of the heart when a blood vessel tore causing internal bleeding and ending in severe brain damage. Osman is not expected to ever be able to see, speak or walk.

Seattle Children’s Hospital has had quite a few medical errors recently in just the last month a newborn baby died in the hospital’s neonatal ambulance after a staff member administered treatment without the approval of a doctor. And just two days later an 8-month-old, Kaia Zautner died after a nurse overdosed the infant on calcium-chloride, giving her 10 times the necessary dose.

Also, an adult received improper treatment in Seattle Children’s Hospital’s emergency room, but luckily survived the incident.

Though these incidents all raise a little concern about the hospitals credentials, according to recent studies these incidents happen in hospitals throughout the nation, but most, go unreported in spite laws requiring the reporting medical errors. Just recently a case against Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center was brought to public’s attention when a healthy man was overdosed on pain medication after a routine surgery killing him. This medical error case went unreported by the hospital and because of loopholes in our current system has left the hospital with a clean record of zero medical errors over the last 5 years.

The safety problem in hospitals was brought to the public’s attention ten years ago in the report “To Err is Human”, sadly Children’s Hospital is one of only a hand full of hospitals to actually take the need for medical error reporting seriously and try to learn from their mistakes even with the harsh scrutiny of the public. More hospitals need to take accountability for their mistakes like Children’s has done.
To learn more about the significance of medical errors read the article: “Medical Errors Kill More than Car Accidents”.