MALPRACTICE IN HEALTH CARE

Malpractice in Health Care



Malpractice in Health Care

Introduction

The study is related to malpractice in health care, according to some estimates, physicians, surgeons and nurses make approximately three million mistakes every year. The vast majority of medical errors cause no short or long term harm to patients, but a minority proves to have an adverse effect of some kind.

For example, in late 1995, Betsy Lehman, a Boston Globe health reporter who had been diagnosed with cancer, died after nurses accidentally treated her with excessively high levels of anti-cancer chemical treatments (chemotherapy). Had the nurses administered the correct dosages of chemotherapy, Lehman might have lived much longer. Lehman's death received nationwide media coverage, and like all highly publicized medical mishaps, it raised new fears about the safety of health care.

Discussion

In relation to malpractice in health care, even as medical breakthroughs continue to prolong and enhance the quality of Americans' lives, medical errors are occasionally made. The question of who should be held accountable for those mistakes has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. For example, women who have experienced health problems after receiving silicone breast implants have sued the plastic surgeons who performed their operations, the hospitals at which the operations took place and the manufacturers of the implants. The controversy over liability for breast implants has played a large role in sparking recent debate over medical malpractice and liability laws (William and Rogan, 2006).

Polls indicate that medical errors may be relatively common. In a survey of 1,500 adults conducted for the American Medical Association's National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) in 1997, 42% of respondents said that they, a friend or a relative had been the victim of some sort of medical error at some point in their lives. The most common types of medical errors reported were mistakes in prescribing medication, mishaps during medical procedures such as surgery, misdiagnoses and incorrect treatments of illnesses, and administrative errors (including the loss or switching of patients' medical records).

Some medical mistakes result from negligence on the caregiver's part. In legal terms, negligence refers to the failure of a professional to employ his or her skills effectively in a given situation. Other mistakes, however, are classed as mere "human error"--the sorts of mistakes everyone makes from time to time. The bulk of malpractice legal disputes arise from arguments over whether a medical mistake resulted from negligence or simple human error.

No uniform system of reporting medical errors has been instituted in the U.S., so analysts can only estimate the rate at which mistakes actually occur. A landmark report issued in 1991 by researchers at Harvard University estimated the frequency of medical errors in the U.S. by examining 30,000 hospital records in New York State in 1984 (Vasanthakumar, 2001).

The report, known as the Harvard Medical Practice Study, concluded that 4% of the hospitalizations involved some sort of serious medical error that caused either death, injury or a prolonged hospital stay due to ...