Observers offer tips on how to survive your doctor or hospital – NorthJersey.com

There is the “No news is good news syndrome,” as he calls it. That’s when you don’t hear back about test results, so you assume everything is fine. “You think, ‘If something was wrong, they would have called me,’ ” Leone said.

Not necessarily. “A test result comes into a busy practice. It may have gone to the front desk, and it ended up getting filed, instead of being read by the doctor. Don’t ever go by ‘No news is good news.’ Call, if you get a test,” he said.

“We’ve handled three cases of people who went for pre-procedural chest screening x-rays that were never reported to the patient and never reported to the doctor. Years later, stage four lung cancer was found that otherwise would have been treatable years earlier,” said Drew Britcher, Leone’s law partner.

A study released earlier this year by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third-leading cause of death in the United States. The study stresses how it says shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the public from knowing about the problem. The research estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. That would rank just behind heart disease and cancer on the Centers for Disease Control’s list, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.

Medical mistakes resulting in death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive, according to the study.

Leone and Britcher, no strangers to medical malpractice cases in their combined 50-plus years practicing law, say certain mistakes are more common than others. Should patients be afraid? “The word ‘afraid’ is the wrong word,” Leone said. “Even in the best of medical care, things can go badly. Just because of the sheer number of patient-provider encounters and the number of admissions, it’s inevitable that there will be certain errors that occur. So no, people should not be afraid. But they need to know that there are things they can do to lessen the chances of an error.”

Along with the “No News Is Good News” avoidance tip, here are some others.

Sterile is in the eyes of the beholder. “If someone has a set of gloves on when they walk into the room, you want to know that they just put them on. You want to SEE them put the gloves on. You want to SEE that they have changed a syringe, and that they don’t leave a dirty needle lying out, uncovered … You need to watch how your care providers are in fact undertaking good sterile technique. You need to be an advocate for yourself. You don’t want to be a pain. But the squeaky wheels get greased – as long as you put it in a polite manner,” Leone said.

Watch for similarly named and/or packaged pills. “There has been some difficulty with meds that have very different purposes but very similar names. Or the packaging is very similar,” Leone said. One should never rely on a doctor’s handwriting, though Leone noted that the advent of digital medical records has pretty much alleviated at least that much as a cause for potential mix-ups. All the same, look carefully at the names and the packagings.

Does the pill LOOK wrong? “Open this stuff up in the pharmacy, look at it with the pharmacist and make sure it is the right pill and the right prescription. Don’t be afraid to say something, if the pill doesn’t look right to you. We have had so many of those. Where people have gotten the wrong medication and they end up in the hospital. The number of times that happens is more than we would like to see, unfortunately. It’s not even that there is that high a percentage of the occurrence. But there are so many prescriptions being filled for so many patients, even if you have one-one-hundredth errors, that means there are thousands of them occurring every year,” Leone said.

X marks the spot. You may have seen the horror stories on television news shows already – that rare occasion when a doctor operates on the wrong ventricle, the wrong arm, the wrong organ. Why chance it? “If you are going to have an operation, don’t be afraid to have them mark the correct side of the body,” Britcher said. “I can tell you that many moons ago, when my daughter had to have an operation on her left ear, a woman took out a marking pen and made sure she marked the correct ear. I was very impressed with that. I can also tell you that Armand and I (sued) a very well-respected and competent radiologist who was supposed to be performing a procedure on a woman whose breast cancer had spread to her liver and the chemotherapy was supposed to be administered to the liver. Instead, they injected it into her breast.”

Save all reports and test results. “There is only a five-year requirement for a medical facility to keep your records,” Leone said. “If you get copies of your reports and keep them, you can make those available to doctors in the future so they have the information they need. Keeping copies of critical information – coronary artery tests, blood tests, mammograms — can prevent a hole later.”

Email: petrick@northjersey.com