Indiana Injury Law Blog

A new study indicates to Indiana product liability attorneys that there are serious injury risks to children, when liquid medications do not come with correct or appropriate dosage measurements. The study, which has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, studied about 200 popular children's liquid medications, including over-the-counter painkillers, stomach and allergy medications and cold and cough syrups.

They found that approximately 25% of the products they researched, failed to include a measuring device, like a dropper or a syringe. Parents, in such cases, would be forced to use tablespoons or teaspoons to measure dosages. This is highly inadvisable. Using the wrong measuring devices could actually lead to an overdose.

The researchers found that even with those products that did come with a measuring device, there was at least one inconsistency between the instructions printed on the label and the device that was included. An example would be a label mentioning teaspoons for instructions, and a measuring device marked out in milliliters. The researchers also found inconsistencies in the kind of measurement units and abbreviations that were used.

When there are inconsistencies in dosage measurements on the packaging, or when the right kind of measuring devices are not supplied with the product, parents may use teaspoons or tablespoons to measure the dose. That can mean vastly inaccurate dosages, and even the risk of an overdose. Pediatricians prescribe medication doses in milliliters, depending on the weight of the child, and when a parent uses a teaspoon, it's hard to get the dose right. Pharmaceutical companies that spend a lot of time and effort marketing children's over-the-counter medications, also need to look closer at the packaging of these products, and especially dosage measurements.

A new study in North Carolina confirms every Indiana medical malpractice attorney's biggest concern-patient safety continues to be elusive in the US, and the number of patients being killed due to preventable medical errors has not really declined.

The study was conducted at 10 hospitals in North Carolina. The state was chosen for the study, because it has strong programs to improve patient safety, compared to hospitals in other states. These should have been hospitals that performed well on patient safety tests. Unfortunately, they did not. Instead, the study found that patients continued to be harmed due to medical errors in these hospitals. While the study was conducted in North Carolina, the researchers have no reason to believe that the findings would have been any different in any other state.

The study aims to be a follow-up to the pathbreaking 1999 study published by the Institute of Medicine, which confirmed that as many as 90,000 people die from political medical errors every year. Since the publication of that study, there has progress in increasing patient safety and preventing medical errors. However, the new study confirms that the kind of dramatic patient safety gains that should have been made, are elusive.

In fact, the researchers found that at least 18% of the patients were harmed by medical care, and some of these were harmed more than once. More than 63% of the injuries occurred because of preventable causes. According to the researchers, this lack of improvement in patient safety can be traced in part to failure to prevent infections from catheters and intravenous lines.

The publication of the study comes just days after another government report found that approximately 15,000 Medicare patients died due to medical mistakes in a hospital.

A study, believed to be the first of its kind looking at adverse events in hospitals, has found that approximately 15,000 Medicare patients in the US die every year from hospital care-related causes every year. According to the study by the Department Of Health and Human Services, the results indicate a fact that Indiana medical practice attorneys have been very afraid of - in spite of great efforts, there has been little progress towards eliminating hospital care-related adverse events.

The study focused on a group of 780 Medicare patients who were discharged from hospitals in October of 2008. These patients suffered from hospital-care related problems like infections, bedsores and severe bleeding from the use of blood thinning medications. The study led to some startling findings:
• About one in every seven Medicaid patients suffered harm because of hospital care.
• Out of the 780 cases, 12 patients died as a direct result of hospital care, including five patients who died from the use of blood thinning medications.
• There were at least two other drug-related deaths. In one of these cases, there was insufficient management of insulin for diabetes care, resulting in the patient going into a hypoglycemic coma.
• About one in every seven patients in the study suffered only temporary injuries, because the hospital was able to find the problem in time, and correct it.

These are disturbing findings, and they confirm every Indiana medical practice lawyer's worst fear. We're nowhere near bridging the vacuous patient safety gap that exists in our health care facilities. Far too many patients on Medicare are still going to the hospital to be treated for their illnesses, and are being seriously or fatally injured by inadequate, insufficient or improper care.

Most of us will need to rent a car at some point in time. However, few will bother to determine that the car we are renting is on not a recall list. For two young women in California, that failure came at a heavy price when the rented Chrysler PT Cruiser they were driving in exploded into flames after a crash, killing them instantly. The Cruiser had been recalled by Chrysler one year earlier due to fire hazards, and been loaned by Enterprise Rent-a-Car, one of the biggest rental car companies in the country.

Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has announced a probe into whether rental car companies conduct repairs of recalled cars, and whether these repairs are complete. The NHTSA investigation comes after auto safety group Center for Auto Safety petitioned the federal administration to investigate recalled vehicle repairs at rental car companies.

In the Enterprise case, the parents of the two women, who were sisters, filed a lawsuit against Enterprise, and awarded $15 million in damages. However, Enterprise denied until the very last minute that it was responsible for the crash. While it's too late for the two young women who died in that accident, there is still time to prevent other deaths involving rental cars in Indiana and around the country. During the trial, former employees of Enterprise testified that the company had no firm policy in place that prevented vehicles that were on a recall list from being rented out to consumers if there were no cars available on the lot.

Indiana car accident lawyers would never tolerate auto manufacturers selling cars that have been recalled, before these were fixed. It makes no sense therefore, that we fail to prevent rental companies from renting out these same recalled cars to innocent consumers, who have no idea they're possibly driving a dangerous and defective machine. The NHTSA needs to come down harder on rental car companies that place innocent motorists’ lives at risk.

Approximately 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke every year, and between 200,000 and 500,000 suffer mini strokes, which are small periods of stroke-like attacks called Transient Ischemic Attacks. In both these cases, a person is at a high risk of suffering a stroke within the next year. He may also suffer from impaired motor skills and cognitive function. Those can be debilitating conditions for a person, and even more so, for commercial truck drivers. Now, a special panel appointed by the Department of Transportation has redefined guidelines for commercial truck drivers is before they return to work after suffering a stroke.

You don't have to be an Indiana truck accident lawyer to know that there are immense risks to motorist safety if a commercial truck driver suffers a medical emergency behind the wheel. The risk of such medical emergencies is very high in case of a truck driver who has already suffered a stroke in the past. It may not just be a medical emergency that causes an accident. Serious accidents can also occur when a truck driver has his driving abilities compromised because of impaired motor skills or cognitive impairment.

The Medical Review Board appointed by the Department Of Transportation has now issued recommendations for truck drivers who want to return to work after a stroke. According to the new guidelines, these drivers should go off the road for at least one year before being able to drive again. They must also be required to pass a driving test. Besides, the driver must also be put through a series of health assessment tests before he's allowed to drive again. The Medical Review Board also recommends placing drivers’ health checkup data on health records.
The recommendations will now be taken up by both the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the US DOT, although neither of these agencies is under any obligation to implement these guidelines.

Nine schoolchildren were injured when their school bus was involved in an accident with a commercial truck in southwest Indiana last week. According to news reports, the semi truck sideswiped a school bus on State Road 57 about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis. According to the school superintendent, the bus had stopped for a child to get down, when it was sideswiped by the truck. Nine students on the bus were injured seriously enough to be taken to the hospital. The truck driver also sustained minor injuries in the accident.

As Indiana truck accident lawyers, we see that in any accident involving a truck and another vehicle, it’s the occupants of the other vehicle who have a much higher risk of being injured. Even when the other vehicle is a large motor vehicle like a bus, the risk of injuries is always present in a collision with a commercial truck. Investigations into this truck accident must look at what the truck driver could have done to prevent this collision.

Besides, this accident should also raise questions about school bus safety for Indiana's children. We have no information about whether the bus involved in the crash was equipped with seatbelts. However, children in a school bus can be at a higher risk of injury when they are involved in an accident, and have not been restrained by seatbelts. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has not mandated seatbelts on all school buses, in spite of the fact that so many school bus accidents leave children injured every year. A child who is unrestrained in a school bus has a much higher risk of being thrown about, or even worse, ejected from the bus during an accident. In spite of these risks, the FMCSA has failed to mandate personal restraint systems on all school buses.

Early this month, the National Sleep Foundation sponsored a campaign to reduce the numbers of auto and truck drivers, who continue to drive when their fatigued or drowsy. The campaign coincided with the results of a survey by the AAA showing that drowsy driving may be related to as many as 16.5% of all fatal car accidents.

Drowsy driving is a silent killer on Indiana roads, contributing to more accidents than we know. It can be hard to define whether drowsy driving was indeed a factor in an accident, because motorists rarely admit to police officers that they dozed off while driving.

While the focus on drowsy motorists have only now increased, fatigue among truck drivers has been a serious source of concern to Indiana truck accident lawyers and trucking safety groups for a while now. Driver fatigue is a major contributing factor to accidents on our highways, blamed for hundreds of truck accidents every year. The trucker lifestyle may be especially at risk for tired driving. Truckers work alone, and on long routes, without company. The risk of falling asleep at the wheel is especially great when a truck driver is driving along an empty highway. Besides, these people suffer from irregular sleep and rest patterns, contributing to the risk of dozing off while driving.

Another factor contributing to truck driver drowsiness is sleep apnea, a condition that truck drivers seem to be very predisposed to. One of the causal factors of sleep apnea is obesity, which has risen to near epidemic levels among truck drivers. A person who has sleep apnea suffers from sleeplessness at night, and is likely to nod off while driving.

While many studies have pointed to a link between truck driving and development of sleep apnea, federal agencies continue to ignore this problem to motorists’ peril.