ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Between 300,000 and 400,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors every year. That number has been climbing since the first major studies came out in the 1970s. And yet there is no mandatory reporting requirement for some of the most egregious errors that happen inside hospitals, including operating on the wrong body part, leaving a foreign object inside a patient, or setting a patient on fire in the operating room.
In this episode, Kay Van Wey sits down with her law partner Luke Metzler, a birth injury attorney who has taken depositions across the country and written a scholarly article for the University of North Texas Law Review titled Hospital Negligence and How to Avoid Being the Next Victim, for one of the most substantive conversations this podcast has had about what is actually going wrong inside hospitals, why the system keeps failing patients in the same ways over and over again, and what medical malpractice litigation actually does to make healthcare safer.
By watching this episode you will understand:
- What the data actually shows about how dangerous hospitals are and why the real number is likely far higher than any study has captured
- Why there is no mandatory reporting requirement for some of the most serious medical errors in the country
- Why the aviation industry's approach to safety is the model healthcare refuses to follow
- Why checklists and timeouts exist for wrong site surgery and why patients still get operated on in the wrong place anyway
- The most common and preventable causes of birth injuries including HIE and cerebral palsy
- How medical malpractice litigation drives real systemic change inside hospitals
- Why the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology publicly stated its goal was to create literature to defend lawsuits and what that means for patients
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
2:00 Why Almost Every Medical Error Is a System Failure, Not Just a Bad Doctor
5:00 Luke's Article: Hospital Negligence and How to Avoid Being the Next Victim
6:30 Are Hospitals Actually Dangerous? What Decades of Data Show
12:00 Why We Don't Know the True Number of Preventable Medical Deaths
19:00 Why Hospitals Self-Regulate and Why That Is a Problem
24:00 The Science of Patient Safety and Why It Is Not Being Applied
29:00 Birth Injuries: The Most Common Preventable Causes of HIE and Cerebral Palsy
34:00 What Medical Malpractice Litigation Actually Does to Make Healthcare Safer
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Have you or someone you love been affected by a preventable medical error? Tell us your story in the comments.
At Van Wey & Metzler Law Firm in Dallas, Texas, Kay Van Wey and her team advocate for families affected by medical malpractice, hospital negligence, birth injuries, surgical errors, preventable medical harm, and unsafe healthcare systems.
Van Wey & Metzler Instagram: @vanweymetzlerlaw Van Wey & Metzler LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vanweylaw/ Van Wey & Metzler Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanweymetzlerlaw Learn more about Van Wey & Metzler Law Firm: https://www.vanweylaw.com/ AdvoKAYte Podcast: https://www.vanweylaw.com/advokayte-podcasts/ AdvoKAYte Instagram: @advokaytepodcast AdvoKAYte Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/advokaytepodcast/
