Doctors are full of advice: Eat healthy. Exercise. Don’t miss your medications. Don’t get that unnecessary test. The premise behind this advice is simple: most people have little medical knowledge and doctors, by giving their patients more and better information about their health and available treatments, can help them make better decisions.
Preventable medical harm is still far too common, but experts say patients can take steps to protect themselves. One in 20 patients (6%) is impacted by preventable medical errors, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ. What’s more, about 12% of preventable patient harm results in “prolonged, permanent disability” or even death.
On the day Jathan Laverty turned 26, he was working at a Columbus, Ohio, coffee shop and freelancing as a corporate event technician, hoping to get a foot in the door of the event planning industry. This birthday turned that search for a full-time job into something urgent. Laverty has Type 1 diabetes, and as of that day in 2017, he was no longer eligible for coverage under his parents’ health insurance.
At first, a doctor at St. Mark’s Hospital told Donnamay Brockbank’s family that her open-heart surgery had been completed without a hitch. The 62-year-old had arrived at the hospital in Millcreek, Utah, on July 11, 2018, to remove a metal heart device that was causing an allergic reaction.
The mother of a newborn and her boyfriend have been arrested after the disturbing murder of the baby soon after she gave birth at a California hospital. Andrea Torralba, 20, and David Villa, 21, both of Oxnard, California, about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, were taken into custody on Friday afternoon after police responded to St. John’s Medical Center.
Eleven rural hospitals in Wisconsin stopped routinely delivering babies in the past 10 years, a report shows. The closures were due to the challenge of a low number of both on-call providers and number of deliveries, the report by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health said.