West Des Moines, Iowa Personal Injury Blog

In Iowa and across the U.S., nurses must face a stressful work environment, and this can cause them to lose focus and make mistakes. The following are the five most common errors made by nurses both new and experienced.

First are medication errors. Nurses are liable to confuse two patients and give one the other's medication or confuse two drugs with similar names. To avoid these errors, nurses should double-check names as well as patients' height and weight, continually update the list of medications and ask patients about any allergies prior to the administration of a drug.

Central Iowa residents should know that a majority of medical malpractice claims arise because of a diagnostic error, usually misdiagnosis. This was the conclusion of a study published in the journal Diagnosis in July 2019. In particular, there were three types of conditions that were behind most of the errors: cancers, vascular events and infections.

Of the 55,000 or so malpractice claims that researchers analyzed, nearly 12,000 were linked to a misdiagnosis. These claims were filed between 2006 and 2015, and half of them were aimed against primary care physicians, including family physicians and pediatricians. It turns out that 74% of these misdiagnosis claims were linked to one of the three conditions mentioned above. The breakdown was 38% cancer, 23% vascular events and 13% infections.

Patients in Iowa may be interested to learn that there is a link between a higher chance of post-operative complications and surgeons whose bad behavior has been reported by co-workers. This is according to a study in which reports regarding the unprofessional behavior of 202 surgeons, as relayed by their coworkers, were examined.

The researchers focused on reports from two academic medical facilities that took part in the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program. Other factors that were examined included the medical and surgical complications that occurred no more than 30 days after the operation for 13,653 patients. The unprofessional behaviors that were reported pertained to polite and clear communication, worries regarding unsafe or inadequate care, an absence of truthfulness and not fulfilling professional responsibilities.

When Iowa residents take legal action after suffering injury, loss or damage due to the negligent actions of doctors or hospitals, they must convince the jury of two things to be successful. They must first establish that the medical care they received was not up to the generally accepted standards of the health care industry. Once this has been done, they must prove that the harm they suffered was directly caused by the substandard treatment they received.

Convincing a jury that doctors or hospitals provided treatment that deviated from acceptable medical standards is sometimes reasonably straightforward in medical malpractice cases. Juries could be shown MRI scans or X-rays that reveal foreign objects were left inside patients who underwent surgery, and medical specialists could testify that a serious disease missed by doctors would have been detected if the correct tests had been ordered. Proving that these mistakes were the factual cause of harm is often a far more nebulous process.