Chicago Personal Injury Law Blog

A recent report may unnerve some recent hospital patients. Though the report comes from outside of Chicago, it does not mean that medical professionals at hospitals in the area are incapable of making a similar mistake. According to the aforementioned report, nurses at a hospital in Pennsylvania were to blame for medication errors that could have caused serious complications.

An investigation conducted by the state's health department found that two patients had received 10 times the correct dosage of two separate drugs. According to reports, this is not the first time that such an occurrence has happened at the hospital. A few months before these two incidents, three patients overdosed on pain medication while using self-controlled pumps.

After a debilitating accident occurred last year, a 55-year-old woman is trying to regain portions of her former self. Three goals that she has set for herself include being able to speak again, to walk more and to regain the strength in her right hand. Currently, she cannot verbally communicate with more than one word.

On March 2, 2011, the 55-year-old former nurse was run over by a pickup truck while walking into work. She received a very serious head injury that required a portion of her brain to be removed. The brain injury caused by complications from the accident has left her in a state that is, regrettably, less than the one she was in before the crash.

Even if most drivers obey the law, there are still some that do not. This simple truth is one that ended up costing the lives of two children in Chicago late last month. According to the authorities, a 36-year-old man from the 2200 block of South St. Louis Avenue in Chicago was behind the wheel of an SUV while under the influence of drugs.

The man was involved in a car accident at 43^rd Street and Western Avenue around 6:35 p.m.; that he allegedly chose to flee from.

People who live in Chicago may be able to worry less when they head to the hospital. Changes in legislation over the past decade may be creating improvements in patient safety, giving those that are in the hospital decreased concerns over the possibility of a misdiagnosis or a medication error.

In 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act which allowed patient safety organizations to be created. These new organizations were given the ability to perform activities geared toward the improvement of patient safety. One of these actions is the PSO report. These reports often discuss medical issues that have gone wrong in individual cases, but it seems that the PSQI Act does not allow for them to be used in a malpractice suit.