Hospitals Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

August 4, 2020

VA ripped for ER abuse of suicidal vet and ‘Covid cocktail’ at state homes

Veterans Affairs officials are taking yet more fire over medical services provided at the sprawling agency’s facilities:

An internal watchdog ripped a Washington, D.C., VA emergency room for abusing and sending away a mentally troubled patient who then killed himself.
And House members demanded to know why institutionalized and elderly vets were treated for Covid-19 with an antimalarial drug promoted without evidence by President Trump.

August 2, 2020

With Covid-19 surge unchecked, testing, tracing, and key data teetering, too

by Patrick A. Malone

How big and bad is the now-unchecked Covid-19 pandemic and the damage it is inflicting on this country?

The United States persists as the novel coronavirus epicenter, blowing past previous record numbers of infections to more than 4.5 million. The disease has edged toward claiming the lives of roughly 155,000 Americans. Imagine if the equivalent, the population of Alexandria, Va., died in just a few months.

July went in the books as the cruelest month, thus far, with Covid-19 infections doubling over June’s tallies, deaths surging, and the coronavirus surging or parking at a high and lethal plateau in most parts of the country,

July 29, 2020

Patients to hospitals: Please quit, already, with the grubbing for donations

by Patrick A. Malone

It may be surprising that the questions went unasked before. The outcomes may be less than shocking. But patients, in a new and nationally representative survey, have told hospitals to bug off with their relentless grubbing for donations from the people they care for.

Doctors and ethicists long have been wary of the huge energy that big hospitals and major academic medical centers sink in to soliciting donations and how institutions’ policies and practices for fundraising may sully public perceptions that medicine is about money and not science or compassionate care, the New York Times reported.

And while medical philanthropy has become an important and central concern of many hospitals and academic centers, driving big and booming “advancement” operations and wrapping doctors into dollar-raising moves, researchers had not delved until now into patients’ thinking.

July 22, 2020

VA hospital care under fire again after aide pleads to killing seven patients in West Virginia

by Patrick A. Malone

She was a 46-year-old Army veteran hired by the Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in 2015 with no certification or license to care for patients. Reta Mays worked in the middle of the night, tending to elderly, onetime service personnel, sitting bedside and monitoring their vitals, including their blood sugar levels. Mays went room to room, largely unnoticed for three years on Ward 3A.

But as unexplained deaths mounted on the surgical unit between 2017 and 2018, the bespectacled mother of three — who had served in the Army National Guard and had deployed to Iraq and Kuwait — shifted from being a nurse’s aide to becoming a murder suspect.

She now has confirmed in court that she injected multiple doses of insulin in at least seven patients in the rural Veterans Affairs hospital a few hours away from the nation’s capital, causing the frail victims’ blood glucose levels to plunge in fatal fashion.

July 14, 2020

Aged, ill, and injured get shabby treatment at ‘care’ facilities across country

by Patrick A. Malone

To paraphrase the late, great writer and activist Maya Angelou, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are showing the public in the middle of this pandemic just truly what they are.

It is hard to believe, still, the shabby way they are treating the aged, sick, and injured. Just consider this sampling of recent news reports:

“Care” facilities — including centers dealing with veterans — have been too willing to subject residents to risky medical experimentation to fight the novel coronavirus, including what appear to be inappropriate treatments with a much-promoted anti-malarial drug. This echoes a situation involving nursing home residents in Galveston, Texas, and their facility’s dosing them with hydroxychlorquine without their loved ones’ knowledge and iffy circumstances about their individual capacity to consent to receiving the drug. As the Washington Post reported of a Philadelphia area veterans’ facility (shown in federal photo above):

July 6, 2020

With half of a terrible ’20 now done, can federal torpor on pandemic change?

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation shudders into the second half of 2020, months deep into an unchecked Covid-19 pandemic that has infected 2.8 million Americans and killed roughly 130,000 of us.

America has become the coronavirus’s outbreak epicenter, its would-be travelers shunned by leading nations around the world as too risky to allow without quarantines or outright bans.

Five states set new infection records, and 40 of the 50 states report worrisome spikes in detected coronavirus cases (see New York Times graphic, above, of newly reported U.S. Covid-19 cases).

June 30, 2020

GOP keeps insisting on a health care showdown. Voters may give it to them.

by Patrick A. Malone

In the middle of a pandemic with a novel virus that has infected at least 2.5 million Americans and killed roughly 127,000, and with 20 million people jobless, what is a prime Republican response? They are advancing yet again a court case to strip tens of millions of poor, working poor, and middle-class Americans of health insurance.

By the way, when doing so — by seeking a total repeal of the Affordable Care Act — the Trump Administration and a collection of states led by Republican attorneys general also would put at huge risk key health insurance safeguards that Americans embrace, including:

They no longer would be guaranteed the protection of insurers denying them coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

June 28, 2020

Some thoughts about Independence Day in the thrall of a pandemic

by Patrick A. Malone

The United States heads into a long weekend celebrating 244 years of its independence in the deepening thrall of a microscopic killer. And political partisans, with their failure to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, will push further still in the days ahead to divide what has been a remarkable, diverse union of states. Unlike virtually every other advanced country on earth, the pandemic in the United States has become politicized and partisan, to the detriment of our nation.

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 2.5 million in this country, killing at least 127,000 — more individuals than the U.S. casualties in World War I or the combined deaths the nation tallied in prolonged campaigns, combined, in Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq. The disease also may be far more widespread than believed — an even more worrisome possibility, health officials warn.

Despite the unfounded and magical assertions by President Trump, the summer has offered no letup to the predicted sickness and dying.

June 26, 2020

They’re called ‘nursing’ homes. But what medical care can they really offer?

by Patrick A. Malone

What’s in a name? The Covid-19 pandemic should force a major change in the big misnomer of long-term care institutions: Let’s stop labeling them with the term nursing — as if they provide significant medical services to the elderly, sick, and injured.

Instead, the coronavirus may lead the public to bust the myth put forward by owners and operators of nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living centers, and other similar centers about how they treat some of the nation’s most vulnerable people, especially based on growing evidence amassing in news reports.

The care facilities knew they were not hospitals, with extensive equipment and highly trained doctors and nurses. The facilities found they often were sorely lacking gear — especially personal protective equipment. They too many times did not have the staff with the skills or training to treat already fragile residents infected with the novel coronavirus or recuperating from significant bouts with a debilitating illness. They did not have the Covid-19 tests they needed. They struggled to isolate the infected.

June 14, 2020

Why does lethal bungling persist in fixing the Covid-19 nursing-home mess?

by Patrick A. Malone

Hundreds of thousands of institutionalized Americans have been infected with the novel coronavirus. Tens of thousands of them are dead. Yet a lethal bungling persists in the response to Covid-19’s savaging of residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Why?

Their owners and operators agree with medical scientists that significantly more testing is required, urgently, so the sick can be diagnosed, treated, and isolated.

But insurers and owners are bickering over who should pay for Covid-19 tests, notably for institutions’ staffers — many of whom are themselves getting sick and dying. As the New York Times reported: