Category: Medical Safety

Premature baby left to die alone in sluice room, report reveals: A looming patient safety crisis in the NHS?

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By John Tingle

BBC News reported, 24/11/2016 on the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust review of its Royal Oldham and North Manchester General hospitals which identified several ‘unacceptable situations’. The BBC news item states that the review document

“…described how a premature baby had arrived “just before the legal age of viability” – at 22 weeks and six days – but staff did not find “a quiet place” for the child’s mother “to nurse her as she died and instead placed her in a Moses basket and left her in the sluice room to die alone”.

The report goes on to catalogue a number of other shocking events that occurred. Read More

NEW REPORT: Protecting and Promoting the Health of NFL Players – Legal and Ethical Analysis and Recommendations

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

fphs_lawethics_coverThe Football Players Health Study at Harvard University today released a set of legal and ethical recommendations to address a series of structural factors that affect NFL player health. The Football Players Health Study is a research initiative composed of several ongoing studies examining the health and wellbeing of NFL players.

The newly released report, nearly 500 pages long, is based on analysis performed over two years by researchers from the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, and is unprecedented both in scope and focus. (Read the executive summary).

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the legal and ethical obligations of various stakeholders that influence the health of NFL players. While clinical interventions are essential, players’ health is also affected by the environment in which players work.

The report reviews and evaluates the roles of 20 relevant stakeholders, including the NFL, NFL Players Association (NFLPA), players, and Club (team) doctors.  In total, the report makes 76 recommendations.

Highlights of the key proposals are summarized below: Read More

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS, DUE 12/2! 2017 Annual Conference, “Transparency in Health and Health Care: Legal and Ethical Possibilities and Limits”

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Medical care prices against a white background

2017 Annual Conference Call for Abstracts: Transparency in Health and Health Care – Legal and Ethical Possibilities and Limits
April 28, 2017 
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2017 annual conference, entitled: “Transparency in Health and Health Care: Legal and Ethical Possibilities and Limits.”

Transparency is a relatively new concept to the world of health and health care, considering that just a few short decades ago we were still in the throes of a “doctor-knows-best” model. Today, however, transparency is found on almost every short list of solutions to a variety of health policy problems, ranging from conflicts of interest to rising drug costs to promoting efficient use of health care resources, and more. Doctors are now expected to be transparent about patient diagnoses and treatment options, hospitals are expected to be transparent about error rates, insurers about policy limitations, companies about prices, researchers about data, and policymakers about priorities and rationales for health policy intervention. But a number of important legal and ethical questions remain. For example, what exactly does transparency mean in the context of health, who has a responsibility to be transparent and to whom, what legal mechanisms are there to promote transparency, and what legal protections are needed for things like privacy, intellectual property, and the like?  More specifically, when can transparency improve health and health care, and when is it likely to be nothing more than platitude?

This conference, and anticipated edited volume, will aim to: (1) identify the various thematic roles transparency has been called on to play in American health policy, and why it has emerged in these spaces; (2) understand when, where, how, and why transparency may be a useful policy tool in relation to health and health care, what it can realistically be expected to achieve, and when it is unlikely to be successful, including limits on how patients and consumers utilize information even when we have transparency; (3) assess the legal and ethical issues raised by transparency in health and health care, including obstacles and opportunities; (4) learn from comparative examples of transparency, both in other sectors and outside the United States.  In sum, we hope to reach better understandings of this health policy buzzword so that transparency can be utilized as a solution to pressing health policy issues where appropriate, while recognizing its true limitations.

Call for Abstracts

We welcome submissions on both the broad conceptual questions described above and more specific policy issues, including: Read More

Organs and Overdoses (Part II): ‘Higher risk’ donors

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By Brad Segal

In my last post I characterized how overdoses from the surging opioid epidemic have become the fastest-growing cause of mortality among organ donors. In this update, I raise one potential consequence with ethical and policy implications: so-called donor-derived infections. To be clear, I focus primarily on organ recipients as deaths from drug overdose, and drug addiction more broadly, should be prevented regardless of any implications for transplantation. With this in mind, consider how the population of injection drug users shoulders a heavy burden of HIV, hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV) (Table 1). First I will focus on screening guidelines, and then will move on to transplantation of organs known to carry an infection. table-1

Screening guidelines can help reduce the incidence of donor-derived infections, but the lab tests recommended in any policy must balance two potential concerns. First, lab tests have a rate of false negative results. Transplants of these organs will accidentally increase donor-derived infections. The policy question, then, is whether or not transplanting organs donated by individuals with higher risk of recent disease exposure will expose an unacceptable proportion of recipients to infection. This unintentional harm could undermine a duty of non-maleficence to organ recipients. Further complicating a potential screening policy is that the basic lab tests for HIV, HBV, and HCV detect the presence of human antibodies, which work well among a low-risk population, but antibodies might not appear in the blood until weeks after infection (Table 2).Recent infections are better detected by nucleic acid amplification (NAT) testing.To mitigate risk of infection,then, transplant screening policies should require a heightened level of surveillance among donors with a history of illicit drug use. Read More

Improving the safety of maternity care in the National Health Service (NHS) and other medico-legal matters

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By John Tingle

There are some very interesting Government patient safety and access to justice policy development activities currently going on in England.

Maternity Services

In maternity services, there is a clear recognition by Government that safety is inconsistent and that there is significant scope for improvement. Our still birth rates are amongst the highest in Europe despite the National Health Service (NHS) making advances in patient safety in this area. In the National Maternity Review we are reminded that half of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections of maternity services result in safety assessments that are either ‘inadequate’ (7%) or ‘requires improvement (41%) (page 22). The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.

In a speech to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) in London, the Secretary of State for Health, 17th October, 2016, Jeremy Hunt laid out plans to make giving birth safer, including maternity safety funding and other related matters. The Government’s ambition is to halve neonatal death, stillbirth, maternal death and brain injuries caused during or shortly after labour by 2030 and a series of measures were  launched. There will be a £250,000 maternity safety innovation fund and a new national Maternity and Neonatal Health Quality Improvement Programme. New maternity ratings will also be published to help improve transparency, raise standards and will give families better information about the quality of local maternity services.

A safe space Read More

Medical Errors – The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

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Source: https://i0.wp.com/www.lawbbg.com/images/top-banner/medical-malpractice.jpg?resize=353%2C195&ssl=1By Matthew Young

John James, PhD, became involved in the movement to bring greater attention to patient safety and rampant medical errors by way of tragedy. In 2002, Dr. James lost his 19-year-old son as a result of problematic care provided by cardiologists at a hospital in central Texas. A toxicologist by training, Dr. James taught himself cardiology in order to piece together the events that led to the death of his son despite an extensive evaluation by a team of cardiologists. His journey is chronicled in his book, “A Sea of Broken Hearts: Patient Rights in a Dangerous, Profit-Driven Health Care System.” From there, Dr. James became an advocate for patient safety and a crusader against medical errors. His website is called Patient Safety America.

Major media outlets around the globe extensively covered the recent British Medical Journal article showing that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US.  In 2013, Dr. James published a related paper in the Journal of Patient Safety that showed how nearly 440,000 lives per year are lost to medical errors in the American healthcare system.

I wanted to provide Bill of Health readers with a summary of how Dr. James’s paper in many ways pre-saged and perhaps even exceeds the recent BMJ article. A KevinMD article provides further context in this debate.

Read More

Medical Malpractice Under a National Health System and the ACA

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By Matthew H. H. Young

What will happen to the current medical malpractice system under a single-payer system?

To answer this question, I started by looking at the information provided by Physicians for a National Health Program, whose mission is to replace the ACA (Affordable Care Act) with single-payer. On their website under Single-Payer FAQs, it says:

What will happen to malpractice costs under national health insurance?

They will fall dramatically, for several reasons. First, about one-fourth of all malpractice awards go to pay present and future medical costs (e.g. for infants born with serious disabilities). Single payer national health insurance will eliminate the need for these awards. Second, many claims arise from a lack of communication between doctor and patient (e.g. in the Emergency Department). Miscommunication/mistakes are heightened under the present system because physicians don’t have continuity with their patients (to know their prior medical history, establish therapeutic trust, etc) and patients aren’t allowed to choose and keep the doctors and other caregivers they know and trust (due to insurance arrangements). Single payer improves quality in many ways, but in particular by facilitating long-term, continuous relationships with caregivers. For details on how single payer can improve the quality of health care, see “A Better Quality Alternative: Single Payer National Health Insurance.” For these and other reasons, malpractice costs in three nations with single payer are much lower than in the United States, and we would expect them to fall dramatically here. For details, see “Medical Liability in Three Single-Payer Countries” paper by Clara Felice and Litsa Lambkros.

Let me address the most salient part of the above argument, which states that the significant burden of malpractice recoveries composed of future medical costs will be alleviated because all individuals will be insured. Read More

Legal Dimensions of Big Data in the Health and Life Sciences

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By Timo Minssen

Please find below my welcome speech at last-weeks mini-symposium on “Legal dimensions of Big Data in the Health and Life Sciences – From Intellectual Property Rights and Global Pandemics to Privacy and Ethics at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).  The event was organized by our Global Genes –Local Concerns project, with support from the UCPH Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research.

The symposium, which was inspired by the wonderful recent  PFC & Berkman Center Big Data conference,  featured enlightening speeches by former PFC fellows Nicholson Price on incentives for the development of black box personalized medicine and Jeff Skopek on privacy issues. In addition we were lucky to have Peter Yu speaking on “Big Data, Intellectual Property and Global Pandemics” and Michael J. Madison on Big Data and Commons Challenges”. The presentations and recordings of the session will soon be made available on our Center’s webpage.

Thanks everybody for your dedication, inspiration, great presentations and an exciting panel discussion.

“Legal Dimensions of Big Data in the Health and Life Sciences – From Intellectual Property Rights and Global Pandemics to Privacy and Ethics”

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Healthcare complaints matter: the need to improve the system

John Tingle 1 Comment

By John Tingle

Today consumerism is an essential part of the fabric of British society and complaint systems are heralded in many retail and professional environments. The British public have got used to complaining over the years and this attitude has seeped into the provision of health care services.

Records levels of complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) can be seen to be made every year but the NHS just does not seem to be able to get to grips with developing a good patient complaints handling system.

The Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) lies at the top of the NHS complaints structure and makes the final decisions on complaints that have not be resolved by the NHS in England. The HSO has looked into the quality of NHS complaint investigations where serious or avoidable harm has been alleged.Systemic failings in complaint, patient safety investigations were revealed. Failures which unsurprisingly have appeared in numerous complaints reports over the years before.

For the report, the HSO reviewed 150 NHS complaint investigations where avoidable harm or death was alleged. The HSO also spoke to six different trusts and surveyed over 170 NHS complaint managers to gain insights. An advisory group was later convened by the HSO to test findings.

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Proposed CMS Sanctions Threaten Theranos’ Future

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By Katherine Kwong

The news for blood testing company Theranos has gotten even worse since this blog’s last discussion of the company’s woes. Despite the company’s statements at the end of March that it would correct all of the issues CMS had found, new reports have emerged that Theranos’ California lab may see its federal license revoked. Additionally, Theranos’ founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and Theranos’ president, Sunny Balwani, may be banned from owning or operating any testing laboratories for two years. These potential sanctions have been proposed after regulators concluded Theranos has failed to adequately address concerns raised about its tests by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

How did Theranos get to this point? Read More