Stratton Faxon Decries Amended Statute

Added: (Wed Jan 27 2010)

Pressbox (Press Release) - According to malpractice lawyer Joel Faxon, hospital mistakes are going unreported placing patients in serious jeopardy.

In July 2005, for example, two 81-year-old women died at Hartford Hospital, and their death certificates identify the cause of death as an accidental cut during a medical procedure, with one woman dying of sepsis and the other as a consequence of blood pooling between her lungs and chest wall.

In November 2005, 77-year-old Alfred Povilaitis died at Yale-New Haven Hospital a day after a feeding tube was inadvertently placed in his lungs.

In January 2006, a nurse at Middlesex Hospital accidentally flushed an IV line with insulin rather than the anticoagulant Heparin, causing 83-year-old Barbara Briggs to suffer a heart attack.

In May 2007, 56-year-old William Sheldon bled to death at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London after a surgeon allegedly improperly stapled his intestines during a surgical procedure.

“People come to us because they don’t know what happened to their loved one,” said Joel Faxon, a lawyer with Stratton Faxon in New Haven. “They come to find out what happened to the dead because the hospitals and the department of public health aren’t telling them.”

They don’t have to tell them. They did in 2002. That year the Connecticut legislature passed an “adverse event” reporting law, and hospitals were required to inform the state Department of Public Health when patients suffered certain serious unintended harm. The legislation was intended to compel hospitals to improve care and help patients assess the quality of the state’s medical facilities.

But by 2004, hospital lobbyists had persuaded lawmakers to revise the statute, limiting the types of adverse events that must be divulged and promising to keep reports secret unless they led to an investigation.
State health officials had given assurances that the new law would shed more light on serious medical errors. But an analysis of health department records, death certificates, medical examiner reports, and lawsuits shows that it has had exactly the opposite effect.

In fact, since the law was revised in 2004, the state has investigated dramatically fewer adverse-event cases, with about three out four reported events now closed without a formal inquiry – keeping them hidden from the public – including more than fifty cases in which patients died.

Adds Faxon, “Under the revised law, even deadly misdiagnoses are no longer reportable – with a single exception.” The exception involves patients who have developed severe pressure sores caused by the inaction of physicians and others.