West Des Moines, Iowa Personal Injury Blog

Your focus is likely on recovery when you’re laying in that hospital bed. After all, it’s difficult to get back to work, play with your children or play a round of golf from your hospital room. That means placing your trust in your medical caregivers to give you the proper medication in the correct doses to get back on your feet.

What may surprise you is just how common medication errors are in Iowa and across the country. A 2013 study revealed that nearly two-thirds of the nurses involved had committed a medical error at some point in their career. Of those, just one-half caught the error before it happened. It’s believed that these errors are most often attributable to nurses because they handle most of the medical order workload.

Many patients in Iowa are victims of medical malpractice due to medication errors. In a recent study, researchers found that medication reconciliation training reduces errors when it comes to medication lists.

Physician assistant researchers at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, Multidisciplinary Clinic implemented a patient medication interview to make sure that information on all patient medications was properly captured. They claim that many medical record technicians have not received enough training and are unfamiliar with patient records. In their study, the researchers also found that patients are often unable to recall all of the medications they were prescribed. Many patients did not bring their medications or a list to share with medication technicians.

One disturbing study indicates that people in Iowa may be receiving unnecessary and potentially damaging schizophrenia treatment when they do not need it. Researchers studying a Baltimore medical center discovered that at least 50 percent of the clinic's patients diagnosed with schizophrenia had actually been misdiagnosed. Instead, they were actually only suffering from anxiety. The research points to a potential danger of widespread overdiagnosis of severe mental illness. As a result, patients may receive inappropriate treatment that is also ineffective for treating their actual underlying illnesses.

In order for people to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, doctors look for certain symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, negative symptoms, disorganized speech and disorganized behavior. However, many general practitioners diagnose patients with schizophrenia without referring them to a psychiatrist. While lots of people with schizophrenia experience auditory hallucinations or "hearing voices," these reports are often linked to misdiagnosis. The symptom can actually be linked to a range of conditions and sometimes may be simply transient. Other times, patients may simply be speaking about their fear and distress rather than experiencing true auditory hallucinations.

When people living in Iowa seek medical care, they place a significant amount of trust in their physicians. This is particularly true when somebody undergoes surgery. While surgeries are often life-saving, they carry with them several risks. If a surgery goes wrong, the patient may die or suffer long-lasting negative effects.

In recent years, people have become more aware of robotic surgery. In robotic surgery, a robotic arm guided by a surgeon performs incisions and other aspects of the procedure. According to experts, correctly performed robotic surgery can benefit patients in many ways. These include lowered blood loss, less scar tissue, less pain and decreased recovery time.