Med Mal News

California Good Samaritans Get New Protections

California's Assembly Bill 83 was signed into law in August by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The legislation protects good Samaritans who are not medical professionals from most liability when they attempt to assist others during emergencies. The new law was introduced after the California Supreme Court ruled, in Van Horn v. Watson, No. S152360 (Cal. 2008), that only trained emergency medical responders were immune from liability under the state's Health and Safety Code. In Van Horn, a woman sued her friend after the friend pulled her from her car following an auto accident, leaving her a paraplegic.

The Consumer Attorneys of California and the Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC), a tort reform group, supported the bill, which protects from liability those who try to help others in danger. As president of CJAC Christine Spagnoli said, passage of the new law means that “[p]eople who do something and unintentionally cause additional harm aren't going to be faced with having to be potentially sued.”

Montana Supreme Court Takes Up Right-to-Die Case

Montana's Supreme Court heard arguments Sept. 2 in the appeal of the case of a man who sought the right to obtain a physician's help in speeding his imminent death. The plaintiff, Robert Baxter, was dying of lymphocytic leukemia when he asked the State's courts to authorize his assisted suicide, arguing that Montana's constitution protected his liberty interest in choosing to die with the help of a physician, free of government intervention. Although Baxter won his case at trial, the December 2008 decision came too late ' he died of the disease on the day the ruling was handed down. The State's appeal likens physician-assisted suicide to government-sanctioned homicide. The case depends only on interpretation of the Montana constitution, so the Montana Supreme Court's decision will be the final word, absent future action by the legislature.

Joint Commission Alert Urges Leaders to Take Key Part in Promoting Safety

The Joint Commission issued a Sentinel Event Alert Aug. 27 urging health care trustees, executives, and physician leaders to get tough on errors, just as leaders do in other high-risk businesses. Comparing the provision of medical services with the aviation and nuclear energy industries, the Commission's release accompanying the Alert said leaders in the medical industry should take a “zero-defect approach” to safety. “Health care leaders are directly responsible for establishing a culture of safety,” said Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission.

The Alert offers health care leaders 14 specific steps to take to achieve optimum safety in their organizations, including having patients tell leaders directly about their care experiences and including overall facility safety performance in the equation when grading CEOs' and other leaders' performance. To see all the Joint Commission's recommendations, go to http://www.jointcom mission.org/SentinelEvents/Senti nelEventAlert/sea_43.htm

New Jersey Beefs Up Hospital Error Reporting Laws

New Jersey has instituted a new law requiring the State's Department of Health and Senior Services to report on the incidence of 14 enumerated errors made in New Jersey's hospitals in its annual New Jersey Hospital Performance Plan. The Plan is a publication previously mandated by New Jersey's Patient Safety Act of 2004. It already notifies the public of hospitals' preventable errors, but the new legislation takes the notification system a step further by requiring hospital-specific data on the 14 named “patient safety indicators.” The errors to be tallied include the leaving of foreign objects in the bodies of surgical patients and the occurrence of postoperative hip fractures or sepsis. In signing the bill into law on Aug. 31, Gov. Jon Corzine said, “Today, we are enacting legislation that represents an important step forward for the health and safety of our citizens. By doing so, we will be helping people make more informed health care decisions and helping hospitals prevent medical errors.”

Federal Prison Inmate Reduction Order Is Challenged

California Governor Arnold Sch-warzenegger has asked the three-judge District Court panel that ordered his State to produce a plan for reducing prison populations by 40,000 inmates for a stay of the order. The move, which signals California's intent to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court, followed court findings that the medical care provided to California's prisoners is so substandard that it deprives detainees of their constitutional rights. The three-judge District Court panel, however, had already made clear in its original Aug. 4 ruling that it would not consider a stay and would view “with disfavor ' any effort to postpone or delay an expeditious resolution of the terms of the population reduction plan.”

Donald Specter, director of the Berkeley CA-based Prison Law Office representing the plaintiffs in one of two inmate lawsuits, called the governor's move “unfortunate,” pointing out that “[t]he governor himself has said ' that the prison system is collapsing under its own weight.” While true, Gov. Schwarzenegger's camp wants to be left alone to formulate a plan for reducing prison populations, without court intervention. This goal is not being helped by the State's legislature, which is dragging its feet on prisoner reductions, apparently unwilling to release large numbers of those currently incarcerated into the general population. In September, California's state Assembly approved a bill that would reduce the number of inmates by a mere 17,000. California's Senate gave no indication that it would take immediate action on that bill.

Number of Med-Mal Solicitation Advertisements on the Rise

The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has published the results of its study finding that there has been a massive rise in the number of advertisements soliciting medical malpractice plaintiffs over the past several years. The group, which wants to reign in medical malpractice claims as part of the national push for a reduction in health care spending, found a 1,400% increase in these types of television advertisements ' going from 10,150 to 156,000 ' in comparing the years 2004 and 2008. The results of the study may be found at http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/component/ilr_issues/29/item/HLD.html.

Group Asks HHS to Give Hospitals Access to Archived Discipline Records

The Consumer Advocacy Group Public Citizen has asked the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to release several years' worth of records documenting disciplinary actions taken against nurses, nurses' aides and other health care workers. They say this information should be available to hospitals, nursing homes and others as a hiring tool, but that Section 1921 of the Social Security Act ' which created the data archive ' has been on hold since 1987 because HHS has neglected to promulgate the implementing regulations that would make the information accessible. Thus, Public Citizen says, “More than 22 years after the federal government started tracking serious disciplinary actions against non-physician health workers, the infractions ' everything from fraud and abuse to improperly prescribing drugs ' are still kept secret from most hospitals and many nursing homes doing background checks of potential employees.” The group is urging HHS and the Office of Management and Budget to immediately issue the Section 1921 regulation so that hospitals and nursing homes can access the information about the past mistakes of prospective employees. Public Citizen's release may be accessed at: http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2948.

California Good Samaritans Get New Protections

California's Assembly Bill 83 was signed into law in August by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The legislation protects good Samaritans who are not medical professionals from most liability when they attempt to assist others during emergencies. The new law was introduced after the California Supreme Court ruled, in Van Horn v. Watson, No. S152360 (Cal. 2008), that only trained emergency medical responders were immune from liability under the state's Health and Safety Code. In Van Horn, a woman sued her friend after the friend pulled her from her car following an auto accident, leaving her a paraplegic.

The Consumer Attorneys of California and the Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC), a tort reform group, supported the bill, which protects from liability those who try to help others in danger. As president of CJAC Christine Spagnoli said, passage of the new law means that “[p]eople who do something and unintentionally cause additional harm aren't going to be faced with having to be potentially sued.”

Montana Supreme Court Takes Up Right-to-Die Case

Montana's Supreme Court heard arguments Sept. 2 in the appeal of the case of a man who sought the right to obtain a physician's help in speeding his imminent death. The plaintiff, Robert Baxter, was dying of lymphocytic leukemia when he asked the State's courts to authorize his assisted suicide, arguing that Montana's constitution protected his liberty interest in choosing to die with the help of a physician, free of government intervention. Although Baxter won his case at trial, the December 2008 decision came too late ' he died of the disease on the day the ruling was handed down. The State's appeal likens physician-assisted suicide to government-sanctioned homicide. The case depends only on interpretation of the Montana constitution, so the Montana Supreme Court's decision will be the final word, absent future action by the legislature.

Joint Commission Alert Urges Leaders to Take Key Part in Promoting Safety

The Joint Commission issued a Sentinel Event Alert Aug. 27 urging health care trustees, executives, and physician leaders to get tough on errors, just as leaders do in other high-risk businesses. Comparing the provision of medical services with the aviation and nuclear energy industries, the Commission's release accompanying the Alert said leaders in the medical industry should take a “zero-defect approach” to safety. “Health care leaders are directly responsible for establishing a culture of safety,” said Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission.

The Alert offers health care leaders 14 specific steps to take to achieve optimum safety in their organizations, including having patients tell leaders directly about their care experiences and including overall facility safety performance in the equation when grading CEOs' and other leaders' performance. To see all the Joint Commission's recommendations, go to http://www.jointcom mission.org/SentinelEvents/Senti nelEventAlert/sea_43.htm

New Jersey Beefs Up Hospital Error Reporting Laws

New Jersey has instituted a new law requiring the State's Department of Health and Senior Services to report on the incidence of 14 enumerated errors made in New Jersey's hospitals in its annual New Jersey Hospital Performance Plan. The Plan is a publication previously mandated by New Jersey's Patient Safety Act of 2004. It already notifies the public of hospitals' preventable errors, but the new legislation takes the notification system a step further by requiring hospital-specific data on the 14 named “patient safety indicators.” The errors to be tallied include the leaving of foreign objects in the bodies of surgical patients and the occurrence of postoperative hip fractures or sepsis. In signing the bill into law on Aug. 31, Gov. Jon Corzine said, “Today, we are enacting legislation that represents an important step forward for the health and safety of our citizens. By doing so, we will be helping people make more informed health care decisions and helping hospitals prevent medical errors.”

Federal Prison Inmate Reduction Order Is Challenged

California Governor Arnold Sch-warzenegger has asked the three-judge District Court panel that ordered his State to produce a plan for reducing prison populations by 40,000 inmates for a stay of the order. The move, which signals California's intent to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court, followed court findings that the medical care provided to California's prisoners is so substandard that it deprives detainees of their constitutional rights. The three-judge District Court panel, however, had already made clear in its original Aug. 4 ruling that it would not consider a stay and would view “with disfavor ' any effort to postpone or delay an expeditious resolution of the terms of the population reduction plan.”

Donald Specter, director of the Berkeley CA-based Prison Law Office representing the plaintiffs in one of two inmate lawsuits, called the governor's move “unfortunate,” pointing out that “[t]he governor himself has said ' that the prison system is collapsing under its own weight.” While true, Gov. Schwarzenegger's camp wants to be left alone to formulate a plan for reducing prison populations, without court intervention. This goal is not being helped by the State's legislature, which is dragging its feet on prisoner reductions, apparently unwilling to release large numbers of those currently incarcerated into the general population. In September, California's state Assembly approved a bill that would reduce the number of inmates by a mere 17,000. California's Senate gave no indication that it would take immediate action on that bill.

Number of Med-Mal Solicitation Advertisements on the Rise

The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has published the results of its study finding that there has been a massive rise in the number of advertisements soliciting medical malpractice plaintiffs over the past several years. The group, which wants to reign in medical malpractice claims as part of the national push for a reduction in health care spending, found a 1,400% increase in these types of television advertisements ' going from 10,150 to 156,000 ' in comparing the years 2004 and 2008. The results of the study may be found at http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/component/ilr_issues/29/item/HLD.html.

Group Asks HHS to Give Hospitals Access to Archived Discipline Records

The Consumer Advocacy Group Public Citizen has asked the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to release several years' worth of records documenting disciplinary actions taken against nurses, nurses' aides and other health care workers. They say this information should be available to hospitals, nursing homes and others as a hiring tool, but that Section 1921 of the Social Security Act ' which created the data archive ' has been on hold since 1987 because HHS has neglected to promulgate the implementing regulations that would make the information accessible. Thus, Public Citizen says, “More than 22 years after the federal government started tracking serious disciplinary actions against non-physician health workers, the infractions ' everything from fraud and abuse to improperly prescribing drugs ' are still kept secret from most hospitals and many nursing homes doing background checks of potential employees.” The group is urging HHS and the Office of Management and Budget to immediately issue the Section 1921 regulation so that hospitals and nursing homes can access the information about the past mistakes of prospective employees. Public Citizen's release may be accessed at: http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2948.