St. Paul Personal Injury Law Blog

Doctors cannot remove all risks associated with childbirth, but they must be vigilant. If there are problems during labor and delivery, they must be prepared to respond appropriately. Yet sometimes they create or compound problems when they try to intervene too soon or in the wrong way.

In Minnesota and across the nation, doctors must walk this fine line every day. And when they stray far from that line, the result can be gravely serious birth injuries.

Wrong-site surgery does occur. And when it does, it's shocking - a nightmare that becomes reality. The same is true of prescription errors, such as when a nurse misreads an instruction and administers the wrong medication or the right medication in a drastically wrong dose. These images play on our fears like images from a horror movie.

Yet the type of medical malpractice that inflicts the most frequent and severe damage is something much less dramatic: diagnosis errors. In Minnesota and across the country, such errors account for the largest portion of malpractice awards paid out to injured people by medical care providers and their insurance companies.

As humans, faces are key symbols that enable us to recognize each other. It is deeply hard-wired into our human DNA. The eyes, the nose, the mouth: each contributes to a unique picture of a unique person.

And yet, when we become medical patients, healthcare providers often start treating us as if were faceless. We get reduced to medical charts that summarize our medical symptoms or X-rays that seek to show certain parts of the body. This isn't merely dehumanizing. In Minnesota and across the country, it often results in misdiagnosis or other medical errors because one chart or X-ray looks so much like another.

Many doctors and pharmacists have been making concerted efforts in recent years to prevent medication errors. In Minnesota and across the country, the traditional system of a pharmacist trying to decipher a doctor's not-too-legible handwriting is increasingly giving way to sophisticated electronic delivery systems.

Those systems enable a doctor to choose the desired medication directly from a computer menu. The prescription is then transmitted directly to the pharmacy to be filled. Though such systems are from perfect, they have the potential to prevent many types of errors.