Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Lawyers’ Blog

Anti-Patient Bill Fails In Virginia General Assembly Subcommittee

Victims of medical malpractice gained an important verdict this month when an anti-patient bill failed to garner any support in the House Civil Law Subcommittee of the Virginia General Assembly.  House Bill No. 306 sought to create a pilot program to assess the creation of disclosure programs in health care facilities that were designed to encourage the disclosure of adverse medical outcomes between health care providers and patients.

At first glance, many of us would concede that a bill that aims to encourage the disclosure of adverse medical outcomes is worthy.  After all, patients deserve to learn the reasons why an adverse medical outcome occurred, and the therapeutic relationship between a health care provider and patient can sometimes be preserved or even enhanced with frank discussions of what went wrong.  It is fair to say that no one objects to legislation that is aimed at increasing the opportunity of frank discussions.

House Bill No. 306 went a step farther than simply encouraging frank discussions, however.  The proposed legislation contained a very dangerous provision that would have effectively eviscerated patient's rights.  This provision stated as follows:

The danger behind this provision, and subsection (ii) in particular, is that any disclosure of facts made by a health care provider in the course of the disclosure program would be inadmissible at trial.  Taken literally, that would have meant that if a health care provider reported facts about what happened that caused a patient an injury, those facts would be inadmissible at trial.  These facts would be inadmissible even if those facts were contained in the patient's medical record, even if another witness had knowledge of those facts, or even if the patient's attorney would have discovered those facts during the normal course of a lawsuit.  In effect, if a lawsuit ever ensued following the type of disclosures protected by this legislation, then patient and the patient's attorney would be precluded from telling a jury about basic, fundamental facts about the case. 

The House Civil Law Subcommittee understood the dangers of House Bill No. 306.  As a result, no member of the Subcommittee even made a motion to vote on the Bill.  The end result was a win for patient rights.

New Study Offers Reminder to Parents to Secure Medications at Home

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds parents about the importance of securing medications in the home, and adhering to dosing recommendations.  Focusing only on the medication overdoses that resulted to a trip to an emergency department, the researchers' findings were rather astounishing:

• More than 70,000 children under the age of 18 years visit an emergency room annually due to an unintentional medication overdose.
• One out of every 180 children aged 2 visit an emergency department annually for a medication overdose.
• Most medication overdoses involved children under the age of 5 years old were due to the unsupervised ingestion of medication.  Of note, however, there is also a siginficant number of medication overdoses involving adolescences between the ages of 12-18 years old.  These latter overdoses were most often caused by misuse and medication errors.
• Current child-resistant packaging, while helpful, is not alone sufficient to prevent children's access to medication.

Patient Follow-up Is Vital

This week a number of news organization ran stories about how frequently physicians fail to inform patients about abnormal tests results.  The New York Times reported on research finding that over 7% of clinically significant abnormal findings were never reported to the patient by their doctors.  NBC Nightly News reported on this same study, indicating that one in 14 patients were not informed of abnormal findings by their doctors. 

The research that led to these news storeis was conducted by Dr. Lawrence P. Casalino, an associate professor at the Weill Cornell Medical Center.  He reviewed the records of 5,434 patients at 19 primary care centers and 4 academic medical centers.

Dr. Casalino's study has important implications for patients.  It demonstrates that patients should not rely upon their doctors or their doctors' staff to relay test results.  Patients should not assume that no news from their doctor means good news (that is, no telephone call means that the test results must have been normal).  The repeated inability of doctors and/or doctors' offices to communicate test results to patients means that patients should ask for copies of their tests results, and should review those results on their own.

Some of the more common test results that should be sought by patients are blood tests, mammogram reports, x-ray reports, MRI reports, CT scan reports, and pap smear results.