Missouri Injury Law Blog

I personally see it all the time and in my experience as a St Louis med mal lawyer, most people are not surprised that doctors and nurses cover each other's backs to conceal mistakes and surgical errors even when the patient is severely injured or dies. Before I continue with this article, I must say that the vast majority of doctors and nurses are good, competent, and honest people. But when errors occur at the hands of the minority of incompetent medical care providers, it is not uncommon for there to be a cover up. Most healthcare providers justify the cover up, as to them the doctor or the nurse did not make the mistake on purpose and their intentions were to help the patient. They also feel that if a medical mistake is a "known complication", that automatically means they did not do anything wrong. Well.... as I like to say to a jury..... it is a "known complication" of driving a car that someone may be negligent, run a red light, and cause a car accident; that does not mean the driver who was not paying attention and who caused the "known complication" was not negligent. The same applies to healthcare providers. If they were accused of causing the injury on purpose, that would be criminal, not negligence. I am not exaggerating; I have had multiple defense expert doctors make that exact claim; that the defendant doctor did not do it on purpose, so he was not negligent. Amazingly, an educated person can say that with a straight face.

It is this attitude of many healthcare providers that leads to the justification to cover up 80% of medical errors. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, not according to lawyers associations, 80% of errors are unreported. The under reporting percentages applied just as much to medical malpractice wrongful death as to minor mistakes and injuries. Meaning medical errors and doctor negligence are often covered up, not reported, or reported in medical records as something else to hide malpractice. There are numerous articles about medical errors going unreported and recently ABC News published a story: "Report: Hospital Errors Often Unreported".

I have personally been the lawyer on several cases wherein the operative report indicated something completely different than the post-op radiology images. The operative report will be written as the operation went perfectly, but the post-op radiology images show surgical clips left in, anatomy cut that was not reported as being cut, and so on. One example is a negligent lap-choli case I am currently handling, the doctor's op report was flawless, yet he left multiple surgical clips in the patient on her common bile duct, blocking her bile from her liver to her small intestine and causing a major complication. See Surgical Clips Left on Common Bile Duct by Missouri Surgeon

Keep this information in mind this election year as I am sure politicians will preach about the necessity of "tort reform" and limits on damages. What they are really saying is that their lobbyists paid them a lot of money to push laws that give them special treatment. Already healthcare providers, in most states, have special protections under the law that shield them from responsibility in many medical malpractice situations. Politicians and their surrogates try to scare you with the talking points of needed tort reform to keep doctors from fleeing the state and to keep health insurance premiums for all of us from going up. Before you listen to that propaganda again, see Medical Malpractice "Tort Reform" Myths Proven Wrong by Statistics

See Also: Missouri Medical Malpractice Issues - Almost No Public Information About Serious Medical Errors