Nurse tosses kidney and other examples of heinous health care

Anyone else just hear that on the news?

Oh please come on. I'm so sick of "human error" or "I made a mistake"

There's no excuse for throwing a boy's kidney out. He was donating it to his sister who needed it to live. I'm happy that she received another one, but please.

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Updated On: 9/1/13 at 05:47 PM

Iflit will haunt that person from here to eternity.

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It happened in Ohio. He was 21.

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Yes and they quoted a figure over 5,000 times that such medical "mistakes are made annually. I may have heard them say that the nurse was fired (hopefully).

She was probably too busy texting to notice what she was doing.

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Maybe they did leave it in the lunch room?!

And then someone thought it was a sandwich so they took it.





The whole thing is just so crazy, and to try and use the excuse that mistakes happen is just unacceptable.

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For whatever reason I'm reminded of a Golden Girls episode where Blanche has to decide whether to give her sick sister one of her kidneys.

Rose: Why would she need a kidney?
Dorothy: TO FEED THE CAT, ROSE!!!

XD

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Wow, that is incompetence on many levels!

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Jane, I believe the Family will end up owning part of the hospital no doubt about it!

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Very unlikely, SNAFU, for two reasons:

1. As someone else mentioned above, Ohio has state laws that limit recovery in medical malpractice suits to $250,000. This happened in Toledo.

2. Insurance companies (whose lawyers would represent defendants) keep dozens of expensive lawyers on the payroll whose main strategy is usually to just keep malpractice suits tied up in the legal system for years and years until you give up and take what they offer. (My late partner's father died in a hospital from outright neglect over twenty years ago. He developed bedsores from not being regularly turned by the nurses while recuperating from minor surgery. The sores became infected and the poor man died from sepsis. The family's case is still in the system.) Unless the story becomes very high profile, which this case has, AND you have tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars yourself to pursue the case, your options are limited. The only realistic option is to take whatever settlement the insurance companies offer, no matter how unfair. No top notch lawyer or law firm is going to take on a case where recovery is limited to less than the possible expense of pursuing the case. You don't need to tell me how unfair and grotesque this is. I think I should start adding the most vicious lawyer jokes I know to the joke thread.

The value of the case becoming high profile is that the insurance companies will usually be more inclined to offer a decent settlement to make the bad publicity go away.

Updated On: 8/31/13 at 07:59 PM

My condolences, Jane, it's unbearable to watch someone you love go through such unnecessary suffering. And it's so sad, as we both know, that your story is not unusual.

I think the limit is only $25,000, which seems really low.

I know the hospital is trying to defend against a lawsuit, but for them to say that they didn't have substandard care in this particular instance is absurd. I don't know how they think anyone could believe that throwing away a kidney is standard of care.

Unless there's more to it, the hospital has pretty bad lawyers. The family is asking for $200,000 ($25,000 x 8 immediate family members). They should just settle for $200,000 and be done with it. By insisting they didn't apply substandard care, they're ruining their own reputation.

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"this was in Florida, and many elderly patients are treated with shall I say, less than caring care."

My grandmother lives in Florida, and has been treated terribly in both physical rehabs and hospitals on a couple of occasions. The rehab center she attended after undergoing knee surgery was actually shut down after a series of lawsuits. The nurses/orderlies on several occasions tried to give her medication that she wasn't prescribed.

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I knew some nurses who worked in rehabs/nursing homes and, in their defense, they are frequently short on staff. They don't hire enough nurses and then pay them very little, with no benefits. The workload is high and so is the turnover. But you can be sure that the owners make plenty of money from Medicare/Medicaid. The whole system is broken.