New York City Personal Injury Blog

Medical malpractice based on errors by doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other staff can pose problems at any stage of medical treatment. However, diagnosis errors or medication errors that occur in an emergency room setting can have a particularly critical impact on a patient's prospects for recovery.

A study recently published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, "Errors of Medical Interpretation and Their Potential Clinical Consequences," looked at the potential for emergency room errors with non- or limited-English-speaking patients. The study compared situations involving professional interpreters, ad hoc interpreters and no interpreter at all, and measured factors such as interpreter errors and their potential consequences.

Reviewing audio recordings of patient encounters at two large urban pediatric emergency departments, the authors found that having professional interpreters on staff resulted in a significantly lower likelihood of serious medical mistakes than either other situation. However, errors were slightly higher in situations where a nonprofessional intervened to help translate than in situations where there was no interpreter available.

Three siblings retained our firm to represent them with regard to winding up the affairs of their recently deceased mother, who died intestate (without a will) in Queens County. They indicated that they all had a strained relationship with their 4th sibling. The mother owned a two family home in Queens which needed to be sold.

We filed an Administration Petition in Surrogate's Court Queens County. Pursuant to applicable law, each of the 4 siblings would inherit 25% of the estate assets, since their mother had been divorced and therefore the four children were her only Next of Kin. After serving the uncooperative sibling with a court issued Citation, she retained her own counsel and declared that a will for their mother had been located.

The purported Will devised and bequeathed one hundred percent of the assets to her. Additionally, this new will specifically disinherited the other 3 siblings. The will was allegedly prepared shortly before the mother's death and was not prepared or executed under the supervision of an attorney. The clients were confident that the will was a forgery and a fraud.

Our firm immediately filed objections to the will. After months of depositions and discovery, a settlement was reached whereby all estate assets would be split equally among all 4 siblings, each to receive 25% of the estate assets. Therefore, we were successful in protecting our clients' rights, and getting them what they were entitled to based on the absence of a legitimate will. A long, costly, and protracted trial was avoided thanks to both our estate and litigation teams working together.

In major business and financial centers such as New York, countless employees are hired and/or fired each and every day. For many of these employees, they enter into New York non-compete agreements when they begin employment - although many of these employees don't fully understand the ramifications of these agreements when they sign them.

Basically, employers have new employees sign non-compete agreements so that the employees are unable to directly compete with their employers following the termination of their employment relationship. The general idea is that employers do not want the former employees using information and tactics they learned on the job against the employers in the marketplace. Unfortunately though, many of these agreements are extremely broad and can ultimately restrict employees from obtaining employment even if there is little to no chance of the employees using their prior employers' trade secrets or confidential information.

Fortunately, the attorneys at Pearlman, Apat, Futterman, Sirotkin & Seinfeld, LLP, believe everyone has a right to make a living, and as such, they advocate on behalf of employees hindered by unreasonable or unfair non-compete agreements. In furtherance of this purpose, Richard H. Apat - a Partner at Pearlman, Apat, Futterman, Sirotkin & Seinfeld, LLP - has authored an article in the Queens Bar Bulletin relaying helpful legal information regarding non-compete agreements.

The health care industry has issued many reminders to people 50 and over to get colonoscopies. And indeed, many people do, as the risk of failing to diagnose potential cancer is a strong motivating force.

Recently, however, the issue of excessive sedation during colonoscopy procedures has been in the news. This, in turn, increases concerns about anesthesia errors, as well as unnecessary costs.

Anesthesiologist mistakes are a serious matter. Powerful chemicals are involved. For example, one drug that is often used for anesthesia is propofol - the drug that was involved in the death of the entertainer Michael Jackson.

Excessive anesthesia can cause problems with blood flow to the brain, which can cause brain damage.

A recent survey indicates that more sedation is often used during colonoscopies than is really necessary.

In a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found that the percentage of colonoscopies involving an anesthesiologist more than doubled in only six years. In 2003, the figure was 14 percent. By 2009, it had increased to 30 percent.

How frequent are medication errors in New York caused by illegible handwriting?

A recent Canadian study sheds light on how common medication errors still are in North America - even after years of New Yorker cartoons and other dark-comedy riffs satirizing doctors' bad handwriting.

Ultimately, this isn't a laughing matter. That is especially so when the bad handwriting results in prescription errors that injure or even kill patients.

To be sure, many hospitals and pharmacies are putting electronic prescription programs in place. But these are still the exception, not the rule.

The number of drug errors that result from poor writing is truly daunting. A national study of Canadian hospitals found that 1 of every 13 patients is harmed by a medical error, and drug-related mistakes make up a quarter of those incidents.

The Canadian study found that surgical errors are the only greater source of preventable harm in hospitals than drug errors.

It isn't only bad handwriting that is to blame. Many doctors also have numerous bad habits regarding the use of abbreviations. When a patient takes a drug, timing and dosage need to be clear. Unclear abbreviations can turn a drug that is supposed to help into an agent of harm.

The same is true of drugs with similar-sounding names.

The digital revolution keeps unfolding - bringing with it remarkably easy access to information that once required time-consuming trips to libraries or courthouses.

For anyone interested in the purchase or sale of New York real estate, the latest electronic tool is the availability of offering plans in digital form.

Offering plans are statements of the many rules governing a condominium or a co-op. These descriptions have historically been kept in bulky books. The books are so bulky that the state has had to maintain additional warehouse space upstate in order to store them all.

Now, however, attorney general Eric Schneiderman has announced a new policy of making them available electronically. Prospective home buyers who request an electronic version of offering plans are supposed to be able to receive them on CD-ROM, on DVD, or some other digital form. The change could take effect as early as March 1.

Confession, the saying goes, is good for the soul. But it's not very often that a practicing surgeon publishes an account detailing operating room mishaps and miscommunications - the types of things that cause surgical errors.

That is what has happened, however, in a new book called Confessions of a Surgeon. The author is a doctor named Paul A. Ruggieri.

In an excerpt published recently in The Wall Street Journal, Ruggieri recounts how he threw a defective stapling device against the wall during an operation when it failed to work during an operation on a patient's colon.

Defective devices may not be within a hospital's control. But according to Ruggieri, there is much that hospitals should be doing to improve surgical safety.

For example, hospitals could keep track of how much blood is lost during surgery. They could record this data and use it to address the problem of surgeons whose patients tend to lose too much blood, putting them at risk of complications.

Hospitals could also do a better job of assessing medical history before the surgery. Doing this would result in more effective treatment for those with conditions such as hypertension or heart disease.

Elevators are such an established part of modern urban life that we've come to take them for granted. But when they are not maintained properly, they can cause serious injury or even death in a New York escalator accident.

This, in turn, can give rise to a New York premises liability claim or a wrongful death lawsuit.

A terrible fatal accident of this type occurred today when a 41-year-old woman on her way to work tried to step into a New York City elevator. The elevator suddenly rose up as she was stepping in - pulling her upward into the shaft. She was crushed between the shaft wall and the elevator and died of her injuries.

When elevator maintenance is faulty, such an accident could easily happen in Queens, the Bronx, or any other borough. In this case, it occurred in Manhattan, on Madison Avenue, between 40^th and 41^st streets.

It is common knowledge in our society that failure to diagnose cancer is a major, life-threatening problem. If a proper diagnosis is missed, cancer can go untreated for too long - with fatal consequences.

Yet even with these potentially deadly consequences, failure to diagnose cancer is a common form of medical malpractice in New York and across the country.

But this doesn't mean that all tests are good. Far from it. For example, a major federal research study recently found that looking for lung cancer by using an annual chest X-ray doesn't save lives.

The study's findings have just been published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The pool of participants was over 154,000 people between the ages of 55 and 74. One group got yearly chest X-rays for four years. The other got regular medical care, but not a chest X-ray to specifically screen for lung cancer.

After 13 years, there was no statistical difference in lung cancer deaths among the two groups.

These findings suggest that doctors need to use their professional judgment in detecting cancer, not merely rely on one test.