Hospital Negligence

Your Rights. Your Lawyer.

Mistakes are all too common in the hospital setting. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous “To Err Is Human” report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials — and quoted ubiquitously in the media.

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients on Medicare alone in a given year.

Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death.

That would make medical errors the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.

Mr. Milles has successfully represented individuals and their families when mistakes made by hospitals or their employees cause permanent disability, amputation, and death. Mr. Milles has been lead counsel or co-counsel in hospital negligence lawsuits involving surgical errors, retained foreign objects, infections, fournier’s gangrene, failure to follow physician orders, failure to timely diagnose, failure to communicate diagnostics, wrong site surgery, catheter injuries, aspiration, choking, bedrail death, falls, pressure ulcers, anesthesia errors, medication errors, and other mistakes. Mr. Milles has been lead counsel in numerous cases involving hospital defendants, and has litigated significant hospital negligence cases against national for profit hospital corporations.

Mr. Milles has pursued wrongful death actions throughout the United States, including Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Milles also represents families in Atlanta and South Georgia, including Thomasville, Georgia, Moultrie, Georgia, Valdosta, Georgia, Albany, Georgia, and Savannah, Georgia. Mr. Milles represents injured Floridians in Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Panama City, Crawfordville, Apalachicola, Midway, Blountstown, Bristol, Eastpoint, Quincy, Monticello, Tampa, Gadsden County, Jefferson County, Franklin County, Wakulla County, Bay County and Santa Rosa County.

Never events are inexcusable actions in a health care setting, the “kind of mistake that should never happen”. The initial list of 28 events was compiled by the National Quality Forum of the United States. The National Quality Forum is a not-for-profit membership organization created in 1999 to develop and implement a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting. They are defined as “adverse events that are serious, largely preventable, and of concern to both the public and health care providers for the purpose of public accountability.” A Tallahassee medical malpractice attorney at Milles Law can answer any questions about never events or if you believe your loved one has suffered from medical malpractice.

According to a 2012 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, there are as many as 1,500 instances of ‘surgical souvenirs’—instances in which a surgical tool or other foreign object is left inside of a patient’s body after surgery—every year in the United States. The same study suggests an estimated total number of surgical mistakes at just over 4,000 per year in the United States; however, these statistics are extrapolations from incomplete data rather than actual event counts.