The Lawrence Firm Blog

With all of the news of medical malpractice coming out of Kentucky lately, readers might be curious about how some of the various types of medical malpractice rank in the state. Data from the Kentucky Department of Insurance sheds some light on the number of claims resolved against various types of providers in the state. The data presented is for 2012 because the data for 2013 isn’t yet available. The

Seeking medical care is an exercise in trust. You put at least some trust in the professionals you see during your examination and treatment. Unfortunately, there are some people in the medical field that don’t always act ethically or responsibly. When this occurs, the patient often has to file a complaint about the inappropriate actions of the doctor or other medical personnel. If one group has its way, people who

Kentucky residents may have heard of a case where a Pennsylvania hospital was named in a lawsuit after the death of a newly graduated medical doctor from a blood clot in her brain. The legal action charges the medical facility with hospital malpractice after it allegedly committed a series of errors that were compounded due to negligence and a staffing shortfall. The young Pennsylvania woman died a little more than

Kentucky patients who are facing surgery may want to consider a recent media report about an Iowa surgeon who defended robot surgeries despite recalls and several complaints about the da Vinci Surgical System, a set of robotic arms that a surgeon controls via joystick. He claims that during his seven years of using the device, he has never run into any problems that couldn’t be remedied with simple troubleshooting techniques.

Parents in Covington and Kenton, Kentucky are no different from parents anywhere else who want the best medical care for their children and trust their children’s doctors to provide it. Medical mistakes such as a failure to diagnose can occur, but few parents expect doctors to misrepresent a child’s medical condition as parents of an infant with a failing heart recently alleged. A baby diagnosed with a defective heart underwent

By some estimates, mistakes by doctors and other medical professionals are the leading cause of death in Kentucky and other parts of the United States. In some cases, the patients do not know that an error has occurred, but one report asserts that the mistake may have been noticed by other doctors. A recent survey conducted by a professor at the University of Washington’s school of medicine found that, in

Kentucky residents may be interested to learn the story of an organ donation that went wrong at a Long Island hospital. When a wife found out she was a perfect match to donate a kidney to her sick husband, she was happy to undergo surgery at North Shore University Hospital. During the transplant surgery, however, a mysterious fluid dripped onto the freshly harvested kidney. As doctors worked to cleanse the

Covington may not be as crowded as Manhattan, but the news that a New York City maternity ward employee may have spread tuberculosis in a busy hospital may have sent chills to new parents all around the country. No cases of wrongful death from TB had been reported, but authorities said that hundreds of newborns were possibly exposed to the deadly disease from the worker, who tested positive for the

Hospital negligence has been blamed for three recent patient deaths at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center. These deaths are a part of a series of deaths at VA facilities that may have been preventable. On Oct. 23, the VA released the results of an internal investigation that revealed three patient deaths in 2012 were caused by improper or inadequate care received in the emergency room at the Memphis VA Medical

There are reports of foreign objects being left in surgical patients, according to a four-year study conducted by the Mayo Clinic and other institutions that covered 422,526 surgeries. The study found that in one out of every 5,500 surgeries, some type of surgical item was left in the patient. The research also shows that some hospitals are as much as ten times more likely to leave objects in patients than

With all the changes happening in the health care arena in Kentucky and across the nation, some interesting numbers have recently come to light based on studies of the care that U.S. hospitalized patients are receiving. First, up to 400,000 people die in the United States each year in hospitals due to medical errors. This makes medical errors the third leading cause of death, right behind heart disease and cancer.

Patients from Covington, Kentucky, that could have been a part of the seven million Americans who received cardiac stent implants over the past 10 years may be interested to know of recent disheartening discoveries made about the devices. Stents being the go-to surgery has led some critics to wonder if the devices are being overused due to a kind of hospital malpractice, with surgeons enriching themselves at the expense of