Posted on Jan 08, 2013
An interesting, and very good, thing has happened in the last few weeks: there’s been a renewed media focus on patient safety, the quality of care patients receive — and most importantly, the new protections put in place to identify and penalize those health care providers that don’t do enough to limit mistakes.
In December, the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wrote of a new Johns Hopkins study which revealed at least 4,000 “never events” — wrong site surgery, implements left behind, etc. — occur annually in American hospitals. Just days later, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that under a new Medicare program to “reward or punish hospitals based on how consistently they fulfilled a dozen standards of care and how patients rated the care they received”, 18 area hospitals will be penalized, 22 will be rewarded and two held harmless.
But perhaps the biggest story so far was the hour long CNN story about the “25 Most Shocking Medical Mistakes” that ran this past weekend. The feature, and the stories it told of the impact medical mistakes have on people, was heartrending. A select number of the CNN clips can be seen at a special website — medmalfacts.com — the Pennsylvania Association for Justice developed to push back against the campaign of distortion the tort reform movement has been fighting for a generation. I hope you get a chance to visit the new site, or one of the other special sites we’ve built: tortreformtruth.com, protectpadrivers.com or protectpaworkers.com.
I know it’s a new year so there’s a great deal of time left in the year for the tort reform movement to strike again, but I’m feeling pretty good that maybe people are finally understanding the devastating impact preventable medical errors and malpractice can have on individuals.
Scott B. Cooper
President – Pennsylvania Association for justice
If you have an injury or a loved one is injured or killed as a result of substandard care or actions which you believe was caused by negligent or reckless conduct, feel free to contact Central Pennsylvania based Schmidt Kramer Injury Lawyers at 717-888-8888 who specialize in Pennsylvania personal injury and can answer any questions you may have about inadequate care.