Delaware Business Lawyer Blog

As a Delaware medical malpractice attorney, I can never get used to the words "sometimes, bad things happen in hospitals." The reason these words bother me so much is that I only hear them when the bad thing that happened was preventable. One of these preventable bad things is infection.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center recently announced the results of a large study about infections from surgery. According to the lead author of the study:

"We found that patients with surgical site infections due to MRSA were 35 times more likely to be readmitted and seven times more likely to die within 90 days compared to uninfected surgical patients."

"These patients also required more than three weeks of additional hospitalization and accrued more than $60,000 in additional charges."

MRSA infection is caused by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, often called "staph." MRSA infections that occur in hospitals or other health care settings such as nursing homes and dialysis centers is commonly known as HA-MRSA, which stands for health care-associated MRSA.

MRSA usually starts as small red bumps that looks like pimples, boils or spider bites. These can quickly turn into deep, painful abscesses that require surgical draining. In some cases, the bacteria remain confined to the skin, but in other cases they can penetrate into the body, causing potentially life-threatening infections in bones, joints, surgical wounds, the bloodstream, heart valves and lungs.

As a Delaware medical malpractice lawyer, I'm currently representing a woman who contracted MRSA while she was in a local hospital. This preventable infection is all too common. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 2 million hospital infections occur each year, and about 90,000 people die each year from infections they got while in the hospital.

This topic was the subject of an interesting book review that appeared in the NY Times.

According to this review, in order to prevent a patient from getting an infection when a catheter is inserted in the vein, there are five things that doctors should:
(1) wash hands with soap
(2) clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic
(3) cover the patient’s entire body with sterile drapes
(4) wear a mask, hat, sterile gown and gloves
(5) put a sterile dressing over the insertion site after the line is in

Incredibly, in some hospitals, doctors skip one of these steps. The failure to follow any one of these steps is a departure from the standard of care, and constitutes medical malpractice.