West Virginia Medical Malpractice Law Blog

Newborn deaths and birth injuries happen far too frequently in West Virginia hospitals. Those devastating events happen even more frequently in home births, the American Academy of Pediatrics says.

The group issued a new policy a few days ago, saying that planned home deliveries should include the same level of care for the newborn that they would receive in a hospital or birthing center.

The job description for a West Virginia hospital patient advocate is not particularly attractive: long hours and no pay. Plus, the advocate must have patience, be assertive and able to ask tough questions of doctors and nurses while remaining calm and keeping track of information received.

While there's no financial compensation for the position, the rewards can be great. Advocates for hospital patients can help prevent medical errors from being committed in the care of their loved one.

According to a John Hopkins University School of Medicine study, the majority of medical malpractice claims comes about because of a failure to diagnose, or because of a misdiagnosis. The headline grabbing stories of sponges being left inside of a patient or the wrong body parts being amputated are actually rarities. Yet a wrong diagnosis is as potentially damaging as any medical mistake.

The study concluded that diagnosing errors resulted in the most cost and most harm to patients. It is estimated that these diagnosis errors affect anywhere between 80,000 to 180,000 patients every year. And failures to diagnose a health issue appear to be a much more serious problem than even a misdiagnosis.

There is an infamous medical error case our West Virginia readers might well have heard of: surgeons amputated the wrong leg of a man. He was in surgery for amputation below the knee of a diseased right leg, but doctors mistakenly removed his healthy left limb instead.

As bad as that case was, and as bad as similar wrong-site surgeries are, "the most frequent, most severe, and most costly medical mistakes" are diagnostic errors, a new study concludes.