Medical Malpractice at Tampa Hospital
The St. Petersburg Times reported last week that a young pregnant woman died from medical malpractice at a Florida hospital. The woman, who was seven months pregnant, came to the South Florida Baptist Hospital with labor pains. The nurse gave her four times the ordered dosage of magnesium sulfate. The doctors at the hospital realized the error, but it was too late to save her life. Miraculously, her son survived and is doing well in neonatal intensive care at the hospital.
My first reaction to this story is not as a lawyer, but as an expectant father of twins. These kinds of stories keep you awake at night. But I was impressed that the hospital’s chief operating officer at a press conference did not equivocate as to the cause of the woman's death, attributing it to the nurse's medical malpractice because she administered the wrong dosage. It is a refreshing break from the usual refusal to take responsibility, no matter how egregious the facts, that we too often see from medical malpractice lawyers representing the doctors and hospitals in most medical malpractice cases.
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Comments
I'm a nurse/paralegal who handles medical malpractice cases (working for a defense law firm). You make a good point about how doctors and nurses do not accept responsibility for their medical mistakes. But isn't the a problem throughout our society? Do lawyers and judges readily admit their mistakes? Having been both a practicing nurse and a paralegal, I would not pick one over the other.
Posted by: Sarah | June 13, 2006 10:05 PM
I agree with you 100%. I think the system sometimes creates the problem. Here in Maryland, the one rule that most medical malpractice lawyers opposed that I supported (which became law last year) is that a doctor's admission of guilt is not admissible in a medical malpractice trial.
Posted by: Ron Miller | June 19, 2006 12:57 PM