RI hospital fined $150,000 in 5th wrong-site surgery since 2007

They only fined $150 K!!!!!!!

I am sorry but there should be more of a penalty than that, for messing up 5 times THAT badly in 5 years.

As I wrote on another thread, one time is too many, two times are unforgiveable. If thre had been a higher finethen, the facility would have been forced to take action soon and fix the problem.

Admitted, it is a sad statement on health care, that it requires 5 errors and a fine to try and force facilities to do the right thing when caring for peoples' lives. Too many management types see surgeons as being money makers for the hospital, and don't want to offend them/slow them by regulation, because they may go elsewhere. They ignore that it is necessary to often force them to adhere to safety standards.

Imagine what this poor patient (patients since this the 5th surgery gone awry) is going through! What about the patients!!!!

A nurse could miss one signature in the medex and lose his/her license, if WE don't cross every I and dot every T.
State Boards can be merciless towards nurses!
I am outraged!

I think every nurse in my state is outraged..I feel so badly for my ex-classmates that work at this hospital. The majority of nurses there are excellent but because the facility for whatever reason lets the physicians call the shots, they are getting dragged through the mud.

Our job is to be pt advocates so we can speak up when things are about to go wrong. How can we do that when we receive no support?

I've seen both the doc and the pt mark the surgical site prior to going to the OR.

Someone also mentioned HiPAA- read the article - they state the are going to notify the pt that they will be taping, which tells me the pt will have the opportunity to refuse. Also the say they will be using it for training which also is exclusionary under HIPAA.

What good is a surgeon if he/she consistently ignores safety? If I were the hospital CEO or whichever bigwig fires, a couple of heads would've rolled after the 1st time.

Such a double standard how the AMA backs up it's doctors yet Nurses get fried for the simplest infractions! Go to court and get every penny you can form that butcher MD! Thatss what the patient should do! And hiot the hospital hard for as much as you can get! There should not be a cap on lawsuites against MD's and Hospitals!

This is a perfect example of why "tort reform" discussions are unethical, IMHO...they serve only to protect the malpracticing MD and hospital from the patients victimized by their incompetence. There should be no "cap" on the restitution that victims receive from these wrong doers...seriously...wrong site surgery repeatedly?!?! And our congress (who do they represent again?) wants to limit the amount of money those people (victims) would receive from the bad guys so that the bad guys don't have to pay such high malpractice insurance premiums. Hhhhmmmm, seems to me that they could go a long way in controlling their malpractice premiums by insisting that their malpracticing or incompetent peers lose their privileges or licenses or both. Just 5.1 percent of doctors account for 54.2 percent of the malpractice payouts, according to data from the National Practitioner Data Bank. Of the 35,000 doctors who have had two or more malpractice payouts since 1990, only 7.6 percent of them have been disciplined. And only 13 percent of doctors with five medical malpractice payouts have been disciplined. [url]http://www.medicalmalpractice.com/national-medical-malpractice-facts.cfm[url]

While medical costs have increased by 113 percent since 1987, the amount spent on medical malpractice insurance has increased by just 52 percent over that time. Insurance companies are raising rates because of poor returns on their investments, not because of increased litigation or jury awards, according to J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America.

Malpractice insurance costs amount to only 3.2 percent of the average physician’s revenues. Few medical errors ever result in legal claims. Only one malpractice claim is made for every 7.6 hospital injuries, according to a Harvard study. Further, plaintiffs drop 10 times more claims than they pursue, according to Physician Insurer Association of America data.

[url]http://resource4medicalmalpractice.com/topics/medicalmalpracticefacts.html[url]

What is the cost of medical errors and negligence? "The cost to society in terms of disability and health care costs, lost income, lost household production and the personal costs of care are estimated to be between $17 and $29 billion. In contrast, the medical liability system costs $6.7 billion annually."

It is ridiculous that people suggest that the answer to the problem of malpractice insurance is to limit the compensation to the victim...unethical!

sorry about my links...

My OR has video cameras in all the rooms. We don't watch every room every moment, but check to see how surgery is progressing, if the patient's in the room, etc.
We also do a time out with the surgeon, anesthesia and OR team in the room as soon as the pateint comes through the door. THE ATTENDING SURGEON IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MARKING THE PHYSICAL SITE/S. Not the nurses.
We also do a second time out prior to incision- and we also have white boards up on the wall with all the required time out information on it. Multiple checks along the way.
I find it hard to believe that neurosurgeons would operate on three people's heads at the wrong site!!!! That's freaking horrible.?
Is there a violation of HIPPA? Nope- no one outside of the OR sees or hears the time outs. It is, however, one of the safety measures mandated by the Joint Hospital folks to reduce "accidental"(negligence) on the part of any one of the team.
Sorry, but that OR NEEDS a royal kick in the but as well as a different monitoring system, since the one in place has failed miserably!

The time out needs to be done with the surgeon, nurses, patient and anesthesia. But you find that very often the physicians do not want to participate in this process. I absolutely cannot believe that a neurosurgeon operated on the incorrect side of the head!!! I have had surgery residents place chest tubes into the wrong side of the chest in an emergency but that is about it.

I feel that every patient who comes in for any elective surgery should be educated to scrub their operative site for three days with hibicleans and mark their surgical site themselves before they go to the hospital.

This is a shame, it really is. And ultimately the physician is responsible because he or she should know what part they are supposed to be operating on and what surgery they are supposed to be doing. Do we need to start holding their hands?