When Gallbladder Surgery Goes Wrong

Less invasive laparoscopic gallbladder surgery has record of serious medical mistakes

Removal of the gallbladder is a common surgery (also known as cholecystectomy) and is either performed as an “open” surgery where a surgeon removes the gallbladder through a large incision, or as a less invasive “laparoscopic” procedure. During laparoscopic gallbladder surgery, a tiny video camera and specialized surgical tools are inserted through four small incisions in the abdomen. The procedure is very common, but serious errors are possible when proper care is not taken by the surgeon when operating in this very tight space.

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“Laparoscopic gallbladder surgery is a less invasive outpatient surgery with a faster recovery than open gallbladder surgery, however it still carries grave risks when the standard of care is not followed by the surgeon to properly identify nearby anatomy.”

— Adam Satin, Medical Malpractice Attorney

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Possible surgical errors during gallbladder surgery

While the risks are low, it is extremely important that the surgeon properly identifies the gallbladder and closely situated anatomy such as bile duct and blood vessels to avoid possibility of cutting, perforating or nicking any other areas with the surgical tools while removing the gallbladder. Doing so can result in symptoms of pain and stomach problems, subsequent infection and the need for a second surgery to correct the problems. If the botched surgery is not diagnosed in time it can lead to severe complications and even death.

Injuries to adjacent anatomy during gallbladder removal can include the:

• bile duct
• hepatic duct
• intestines
• bowel
• blood vessels.

Results of such injuries can results in:

• bile leakage into abdomen
• infection
• additional invasive surgery
• blood loss and organ damage
• unseen complications.

What to do if you had gallbladder surgery complications

If you believe you may have complications resulting from laparoscopic gallbladder surgery, you should seek immediate medical attention.

If indeed you suffered injuries related to gallbladder surgery, and required additional medical care, there may have been negligence in the performance of your surgery and you may have a valid medical malpractice claim.

Recent verdicts and settlements

Below are a few of Lubin & Meyer's gallbladder medical malpractice lawsuits that serve as illustrative examples the types of possible injuries.

• $1 Million Settlement - Gallbladder Surgery Mistakes - An 84-year-old woman suffered a transected hepatic artery and portal vein, and injury to her common bile duct during a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. She sustained significant injuries requiring extensive additional surgical and medical care. (read more)
• $1 Million Settlement - Gallbladder Surgical Error - A 75-year-old woman dies after surgery from inadvertent transection and ligation of the blood supply to her liver during an elective gallbladder removal. (read more)
• $868,828 Jury Verdict in Gallbladder Removal Surgery - Failure to obtain the so-called Critical View of Safety, the standard approach to identifying correct structures to be cut, leads to transection of the bile duct requiring invasive tests and additional major surgery. (read more)

Questions about a possible medical malpractice case?

If you have any questions about the quality of care you received, please do not hesitate to call us for a free case evaluation. We represent patients in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. There is no fee to review your case, and you do not pay us unless we recovery money for you.

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com - Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law

29 Mistakes That Should Never Happen In A Hospital, But Do

Massachusetts is well known as home to some of the world's most prestigious hospitals, such as Mass. General Hospital and Children's Hospital both recently named among the "Top Hospital in the Nation" by U.S. News & World Report and Best Hospitals.® However, even here in Massachusetts, serious medical mistakes continue to happen to far too many patients while in the hospital.

As a follow up to last year's post on Massachusetts Hospital Errors, we have updated our reporting to include new data (from 2015) that hospitals and surgery centers are required to report to the Department of Public Health documenting Serious Reportable Events or SREs. There are 29 such events, also known in hospitals as "Never Events," and we list them here with the total instances reported by the state's acute care hospitals in 2015. For similar information on non-acute care hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers please see the The Massachusetts Health and Human Services website for that publicly available information.

While the total number of SREs in acute care hospitals increased in 2015 (up from 89 in 2013; 82 in 2014; and 1,254 in 2015), most of the increase in 2015 was due to a spike in cases of contaminated drugs, devices or biologics, with most of those accountable to one hospital — Baysate Medical Center in Springfield, MA, where patients were exposed to infection due to unsanitary conditions in the inpatient dialysis unit. Patient safety efforts at hospitals aim at reducing errors, but still too many errors are happening.

In addition to the contamination events, topping the list of hospital errors in Massachusetts are:

• Falls
• Pressure ulcers
• Medication error
• Foreign object left behind (surgery)
• Burns

Review the full list of Never Events below.

Massachusetts Serious Reportable Events

Surgery Events
1. Wrong body part, side or site surgery of procedure = 26
2. Wrong patient surgery or procedure = 2
3. Wrong surgery or procedure performed = 12
4. Foreign object left in patient after procedure unknowingly = 36
5. Death of ASA Class I patient during surgery or within 24 hours = 0

Product Events
6. Contaminated drugs, device or biologics = 448
7. Device misuse or malfunction = 12
8. Intravascular air embolism = 2

Patient Protection
9. Patient discharged to unauthorized person = 0
10. Serious injury or death during patient disappearance = 2
11. Suicide or self-harm = 31

Care Management Events
12. Serious injury or death from medication error = 54
13. Unsafe blood transfusion = 0
14. Maternal serious injury or death associated with labor or delivery = 10
15. Newborn serious injury or death associated with delivery = 15
16. Serious injury or death after a fall = 309
17. Stage 3, Stage 4 or unstageable pressure ulcer = 228
18. Artificial insemination with wrong egg or sperm = 0
19. Serious injury or death from loss of irreplaceable biological specimen = 1
20. Serious injury or death from lack of follow up or communication of lab result = 3

Environmental Events
21. Serious injury or death from electric shock = 0
22. Oxygen or gas delivery error = 0
23. Serious injury or death from burn = 30
24. Serious injury or death from physical restraints = 1

Radiology
25. Serious injury or death from metallic object in MRI  = 2

Potential Criminal Events
26. Impersonation of a health care provider = 0
27. Abduction of patient = 0
28. Sexual abuse or assault of patient or staff member = 9
29. Serious injury or death after physicial assault of patient or staff = 21

How Did Your Hospital Do?
For a hospital-by-hospital tabulation of the most recent “never event” medical errors, please visit the mass.gov website’s Serious Reportable Events page.

Hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers are required by law to report SREs to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The law also prohibits hospitals from charging for these events or seeking reimbursement for SRE-related services. 

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com
Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law. Attorneys practicing in MA, NH and RI.

Massachusetts Can and Must Do Better Job in Reducing Medical Errors

Twenty years after the death of Boston Globe health reporter pioneer Betsy Lehman, medical errors are still far too common in Massachusetts. Lehman died of an overdose of chemotherapy drugs while being treated for breast cancer that was four times the dosage she was supposed to receive. The following video from The Betsy Lehman Center for Patient Research and Medical Error Reduction tells the moving story.



Two decades later, nearly 1 in 4 Massachusetts residents has had an experience with a medical error, according to research released by The Betsy Lehman Center from the Harvard School of Public Health, RAND Corporation and the National Academy for State Health Policy on the state of patient safety at its Zero Harm: Charting a New Course for Patient Safety event in Boston last month on December 2.

The research shows nearly one quarter (23%) of Massachusetts residents surveyed reported that they or a person close to them experienced medical error in the past five years, and of those involved in a medical error situation, 59% said the error resulted in serious health consequences. The most common type of medical error identified was misdiagnosis, which was reported by 51% of affected respondents.

The Boston Globe reports on the findings here. See the full details of the studies from the Zero Harm event on the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) website: chiamass.gov/zeroharm.

Massachusetts healthcare institutions can and must do a better job in reducing harms. As our previous post reveals, a study on a single aspect of care — patient hand-offs — showed significant reduction in errors. We need to see more such improvements.

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com
Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law. Attorneys practicing in MA, NH and RI.

Boston Children's Hospital Study: Better Communication During Patient Hand-offs Reduced Errors by 30%

According to a study led by researchers at Boston's Children's Hospital, improvements in verbal and written communication between health care providers during patient hand-offs can reduce injuries due to medical errors by 30 percent. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), study results show that I-PASS  — a bundled system of communication and training tools for hand-off of patient care between providers — can greatly increase patient safety without significantly burdening existing clinical workflows.

A press release issued in conjunction with the study's publication states that medical errors in hospitals such as diagnostic delays, preventable surgical complications and medication overdoses are leading causes of death and injury in the U.S. An estimated 80 percent of the most serious medical errors can be linked to communication between clinicians, particularly during patient hand-offs.

I-PASS was designed with the goal of improving patient safety and reducing or eliminating the most common source of medical errors through improved provider-to-provider communication. I-PASS consists of:

• Standardized communication and hand-off training
• A verbal hand-off process organized around the verbal mnemonic "I-PASS" (Illness severity, Patient summary, Action list, Situational awareness and contingency planning, and Synthesis by receiver)
• Computerized hand-off tools to share patient information between providers using an I-PASS structure
• Engagement of supervising attending physicians to observe and oversee hand-off communications
• A campaign promoting the adoption of I-PASS as part of institutional process and culture

For more information on this patient safety initiative, please see: www.ipasshandoffstudy.com, and the full press release.

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com
Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law. Attorneys practicing in MA, NH and RI.

Hospital Safety: The Shocking Truth

An infographic recently released by AcceleratedNursing.net reveals the startling statistics on patient safety in America.

Click here to view full infographic.

We previously cited The Journal of Patient Safety, which published a study reporting that as many as 440,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors in hospitals. In other words, 50 people die every hour from a preventable hospital error.

Among the causes of these preventable deaths:

• Falls
• 300,000 falls in medical units, especially among the elderly
• 82,000 of those falls leading to injury 

• Medication Errors 
• 7,000 deaths a year
• Contributing factors
• Communication errors
• Drug labeling errors
• Inadequate lighting
• Cluttered work space
• Distractions
• Fatigue

• Drug Resistant Illnesses
• Hospital Acquired Infection
• 25% of preventable deaths most commonly through
• Central line-associated bloodstream infections
• Catheter-associated urinary tract infections
• Surgical site infections
• Clostridium difficile (bacteria) infections

Click here to view full infographic in full size, and more information on sources.

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com - Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law

Attorneys practicing in MA, NH, RI.

Contact us for a free case evaluation.

Public Citizen Report: Medical Malpractice Payments Remain at Historic Low

Medical malpractice payments remain at a historic low despite rising slightly last year, according to Public Citizen’s annual analysis of data published by the federal government’s National Practitioner Data Bank. The dollar value of malpractice payments in 2013 was the second lowest in the past 15 years.

The report also calls attention to the fact that while the number of avoidable errors occurring in hospitals has increased, the number of liability payments for such errors has declined. It cites the Journal of Patient Safety's study, published last year, estimating the number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients at more than 400,000 per year, with preventable serious harms 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harms.

“Medical malpractice should be treated as a health issue, not an economic one. And the cure is not reducing access to justice for victims of malpractice, but eliminating avoidable medical errors and negligence.” — Public Citizen President Robert Weissman

Both the number and cumulative value of medical malpractice payments made on behalf of doctors increased slightly in 2013, marking the first such increase in a decade. Meanwhile, medical liability insurance rates (which are not precisely tied to claims data and may lag behind payment trends) continued to decrease.

View the entire study here.

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com - Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law

Rush Toward Electronic Health Records Raising Risks for Patients

An in-depth article in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 20, 2014, describes how financial incentives to hospitals and doctors offices to implement electronic health records (EHR) as part of the Affordable Care Act is creating an environment prone to medical errors resulting in serious risks to patients.

The article cites a study by CRICO which analyzed "a year’s worth of medical malpractice claims in its comparative database and found 147 cases in which EHRs were a contributing factor."

According to CRICO, common problems with faulty EHR systems include:

• Systems that don't "talk" to each other 
• Improper routing of test results 
• Data entry errors 
• Copy-and-paste errors 

The case highlighted in the Globe article involves a woman who died of an overdose at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Attorney Nicholas Cappiello of Lubin & Meyer is representing the family of the woman in a medical malpractice lawsuit. Cappiello contends that the nurses were "acting in response to multiple orders for insulin that had been entered into two separate prescribing systems used by the hospital — one digital, one involving paper and a fax — and were listed under the names of different doctors."

Said Cappiello, “The root cause is having two different systems that weren’t interacting with each other. It creates human error. Essentially, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”

View our main website at LubinandMeyer.com
Lubin & Meyer PC - New England's Leader in Medical Malpractice and Personal Injury Law. Attorneys practicing in MA, NH and RI.