New York City Personal Injury Blog

Emergency rooms in New York hospitals are filled with people who are either experiencing chronic pain or are in need of some other type of medical care that cannot wait. When emergency room mistakes occur, such as misdiagnoses, the patient may be at grave risk. A wrong diagnosis can lead to a prescription error, a delay in the patient receiving the right kind of treatment and even death if the right diagnosis is never found.

A recent study showed that the majority of medical malpractice lawsuits in which the patient received compensation, are due to diagnostic errors. The survey covered a 25-year period and involved the examination of over 300,000 medical malpractice errors; it was unknown how many of the errors involving diagnosis issues occurred at emergency rooms in hospitals and clinics.

If you speak to lawyers that handle Real Estate litigation, eventually everyone comes across a partition action.  Richard Apat, Esq., of Pearlman, Apat, Futterman, Sirotkin & Seinfeld, LLP, has handled many of these cases.

Often times a case involves property that is left to two or more sibling and perhaps one or two of them are living in the property and want to keep the property while the other(s) who are out of possession and want to have it sold so they can get their inheritance.  Rarely will you ever find one of these cases go to trial.  However, with the passage of time these accounting issues can become complicated. 

Richard Apat, Esq., recently had one of these cases go to trial involving a 2 family home owned by two brothers.  After the last parent passed, one son was still living in the property with his family.  After years of forbearance the out of possession brother commenced an action for partition and accounting. 

What made this case particularly difficult was the fact that it was 1) a two family house 2) where work was done on the property after the parent passed 3) to improve the property as well as make it suitable for renting out the second apartment.  Finally, 4) a loan was taken out on the property to do the work.  All of these extenuating accounting issues and a dispute as to what work was necessary versus an unnecessary improvement (i.e. updated and renovated kitchen) is where the problems came into play.

Thankfully after presenting a brief opening statement and subpoenaing the defendant to testify  (who appeared less than credible) and calling an expert witness on valuation, Mr. Apat was able to obtain a favorable settlement for his client.  This case was tried in the Supreme Court, Nassau County before the Honorable Justice Denise Sher, March 2013.

While we handle many of these partition actions, we are always available to members of the bar for questions on these types of cases.

Mr. Apat who dedicates 100% of his practice to litigation including adverse possession, boundary disputes, easements, specific performance, partition actions, etc., can handle your Real Estate related litigation.

Nursing homes in New York City often provide a place where veterans of previous wars can be cared for, but sadly, they do not always receive the best of care. Some are subjected to nursing home neglect or even abuse, putting them at risk of injury and death.  Instead of receiving the highest level of honor and respect that they deserve, veterans can be victims of malnutrition, mistreatment, and even deliberate abuse. Sometimes the nursing home negligence goes on for years before it is addressed.

One veteran died after the nursing home facility he was in failed to address medication issues that were previously identified. Apparently, the staff knew that the man was taking too much medication and that some of the medication had not been prescribed for him according to the state’s Health Department report. As a result the man, who suffered with depression and pain, overdosed on methadone.

Many times, New York hospitals are places where things are kept quiet and communication between medical staff and patients is limited to safe topics such as their medical condition or improvement. Few will actually admit to committing medical errors, acknowledging that staff, after all, is only human and everyone is prone to making mistakes. A hospital error can be made at any time with a mistake in calculating medication, a delay in a patient's care or an accident that occurs during a surgical procedure.

However, one hospital is seeking to improve the care their patients receive by taking a transparency approach. The hospital publishes a monthly newsletter which shares cases where a patient may have received incorrect treatment or the process in hospital administration was flawed. The attitude that the hospital has is that if staff feel like they can openly talk about mistakes they've made, it may lead to changes that benefit patients.

A physician promises to do everything they can to keep their patients safe from harm and heal them. However some doctors do things that violate that promise, exposing victims in New York City to surgical errors that could have been avoided. If a surgeon begins making multiple surgical mistakes, those mistakes are generally reported to the state's medical board, which can result in charges and an investigation to see if other patients under the doctor's care may have been harmed.

This appears to be the case for a surgeon that uses a robotic arm to remove kidneys for organ donation. The surgeon has had several charges of unprofessional conduct levied against him after 11 surgeries involved complications. In those cases, surgical errors ranged from forgetting to remove sponges from the patient's body to nicked aortas.

Becoming a doctor requires a great deal of dedication and sacrifice. It means sleeplessness, long hours of study, horrific exams, and a willingness to miss out on other activities in order to care for others. Sometimes these can take a toll on doctors in New York City and create a problem where medical errors are being made, putting patients at risk. While the medical industry has tried a number of different things to lower the number of doctor errors, it seems that perhaps they may be looking in the wrong places.

Instead of cutting hours, the medical industry may want to consider cutting down the amount of work that interns perform and bolstering their staff numbers. When doctors have too many patients to care for, it can be easier for them to make a wrong diagnosis or commit a hospital error that can harm that patient, resulting in an unnecessary death.

Part of the responsibility of a nursing home in Queens is to make sure that their residents receive the right kind of medication and the correct dose of that medication. Improper medication given to patients can cause severe problems and some have even died from the errors made. Patients have suffered from additional health issues due to such nursing home negligence and the tragic thing is that in some cases the overmedication is deliberate.

In 2011, hospital staff was likely surprised to find that an 82-year-old man had abnormal levels of the blood thinner drug, Coumadin, in his system. The man had been brought to the hospital four days after falling from a wheel chair at the nursing home he had been in since 2006. Apparently, there was no viable reason why the man should have had so much Coumadin in him and it soon became apparent that the man was overmedicated.

Nothing can be more frustrating than to be given different medical diagnoses and finding out that each one is incorrect. When people walk into a New York City emergency room, they expect a doctor to find out what is wrong with them and provide the correct treatment. Yet, many patients are given the wrong diagnosis, leading to additional pain and suffering. Many times emergency room errors can be avoided if doctors would look at all the facts and follow through in planned testing.

One woman suffered years of pain and discomfort because of multiple emergency room misdiagnoses. Her abdominal pain started at the age of 13, preventing her from being able to eat. Her mother and her aunts had all suffered from an apparent gall bladder disease and yet neither her primary care doctor, nor the many emergency room doctors she went to, considered it as a cause for her medical condition.

There has always been some form of risk associated with medical care. Before the medical profession realized the importance of sanitation and sterilization, operations often resulted in infection and death for hundreds of people. While medicine and medical processes have come a long way in the last several decades, surgical errors continue to cause additional pain and suffering for patients in New York City and elsewhere, and sadly, some still die from infection and complications.

With so many surgical instruments, sponges, and other tools being used in operations, it is not uncommon for doctors to leave an object inside the patient. What comes as a surprise is that when it comes to sponges being left inside, which is the most common of these errors, most hospitals are choosing not to use a tracking system that could eliminate the problem entirely.