The Lighter Side of Health Law - October 2020

AHLA's monthly podcast featuring health lawyer and blogger Norm Tabler's informative and entertaining take on recent health law and other legal developments.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, I'm Norm tab with this month edition of the of Health Law Urgent Message. This is an urgent message for anyone who has scheduled surgery for the first week in November. The message is, for Heaven's sakes, reschedule. Why? Because the Journal of General Internal Medicine has published a study from the Mayo Clinic revealing that in the seven days before and after the time from daylight time, medical errors rise by nearly one fifth. So if you undergo surgery during the first week in November, you're 20% more likely to be a victim than if you delay by a week or more. Don't say, I didn't warn you. Even I knew that it doesn't happen very often, but sometimes I think I know as much as the experts. Here's an example. Earlier this month, Becker's Healthcare included an article titled Four Common Pitfalls to Avoid After a Medical Error. The article reported the opinions of a panel of experts convened to identify what a hospital should not do after discovering a medical error. Here verbatim is one of the four as described by a Chief medical officer on the panel. We recently had an event where there was an eagerness to disclose the wrong error. What happens is that we wanna be very transparent. However, the error we disclose was not what happened. A totally different mistake had been made. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think I already knew that when you disclose a medical error, it ought to be the medical error that actually occurred and not one that didn't occur, not what the doctor ordered. West Virginia, Dr. George Nam now knows the difference between prescribing and monitoring. George worked in a drug treatment clinic owned by nurse Sharon Jackson. He allowed Sharon to use his DEA number to prescribe controlled substances. When George went on trial for illegal drug distribution, he wanted to argue that prescribing drugs is no different from monitoring compliance with a treatment program, which the law allows nurses to do. The trial court wouldn't even let him make the argument to the jury. And the Fourth Circuit affirmed. George now knows the difference between prescribing and monitoring. It's six months in prison and a 77,000 fine. Is it safe to work at home? Is it safe to work at home? Well, it depends on what kind of work and who's home. Because if it's nursing care and someone else's home, the answer may be no. That's the lesson of a new report by Professional Liability Insurance Companies, nurses Service Organization, and cna. That report says that for the first time ever, nurses in home healthcare were involved in more malpractice suits than any other nursing specialty. In malpractice cases for the five years, 2015 through 2019, home Care nurses accounted for 20.7% of all cases, a 12.4% increase from the prior reporting period. The what Were Thinking award the name of this award for itself. This month's award goes to Los Angeles Medical Company. Figs. Figs has several lines of medical apparel for women. Guess how they chose to display their products? On the FIGS website? They selected a photo of a woman dressed in pink scrubs wearing a physician's ID badge and holding a book titled, are You Sitting Down? Medical Terminology for Dummies? Not offended yet. How about this? She's holding the book upside down. You can't make this stuff up. What's worse than flunking? The bar exam? If you wanna know what's worse than flunking the bar exam, just ask any University of South Carolina law grad who failed. The last one. What's worse is not only flunking, but then finding out that your law school dean notified every student in the school that you flunked. It happened when Dean William Hubbard sent an email to all students, most of the schools at President, 82% pass rate and accidentally attaching a list by name of all grads who took the exam along with their scores and whether or not they passed. It's bad enough to flunk the exam. Worse when the whole school learns that you flunked and still worse when they learned in an email bragging that over eight in 10 grands passed. See something, say something. Kimberly Jackson saw something, so she said something. Kimberly was a discharge planner at Neuro Behavioral Hospital in Crownpoint, Indiana. She told the New York Times that, yes, it's true. Some nursing homes transfer elderly and disabled patients to her hospital wrongly claiming that they're psychotic as a way of evicting patients who are poor or need extra care. Then her hospital saw something, namely the article, so it said something. It said, Kimberly, you're fired. Not because what you said is untrue, but cause you said it, A classic case of shooting the Message Cruel Award. The Cruel Award is named for the villain in one dalmatians, the London Eras who kidnapped Dalmatian puppies for their firm. The award goes to a person who personifies pure evil in the realm of healthcare. This month's cruel goes to Jeffrey Gur, who used his position as a cancer researcher at Stony Brook University, to embezzle a quarter of a million dollars of cancer research funds from the university and the NIH to use for personal expenses, thus striking a strong pre-cancer blow that would make cruel proud. Sadly, we can't deliver the award to Jeffrey for at least a year. The warden says it's a potential weapon. The case is US versus Eastern District New York. Well, that's it for this month's edition of the Lighter of Health Law. I hope you enjoy it.