How Safe Do You Feel At The Hospital?

Hospital stays are bad enough without the extra concern over safety. If you have been injured in a Pennsylvania or New Jersey hospital, you are not alone. A recent study reveals that hospital injuries are a little more common than most of us would like to believe.

One in Five Patients Injured at Hospitals
According to researchers, about 18 percent of the patients they studied were injured by medical care. Some patients were injured more than once and many were killed due to these hospital errors.

The study was conducted from 2002 to 2007 and included ten hospitals in North Carolina. These hospitals were selected because North Carolina is considered to be leading the way in improving patient study. According to Dr. Christopher P. Landigran, the lead author of the study and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, “it is unlikely that other regions of the country fared better.”

This particular study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, nearly a decade after a landmark report, which left the medical community reeling. According to the 1999 report, medical mistakes resulted in close to 98,000 deaths and over a million injuries each year in the United States.

Some Hospital Injuries Were Serious
Of the 2,341 patients studied, 588 were injured. Some of the details uncovered by researchers include the following:

• 42.7 percent of patients required extra time in the hospital due to the injuries
• 2.9 percent of the patients suffered permanent injuries
• 2.4 percent of the injury cases resulted in death

Rights of Injured Patients
If you have been injured while in the hospital, you may be able to hold the medical provider responsible. The best thing for you to do is to contact an experienced Philadelphia medical malpractice attorney for advice. The medical malpractice lawyers at Cooper & Schaffer will provide you with free answers to your questions. Contact us today at 888-545-4755. We have offices conveniently located in Philadelphia, PA, Jenkintown, PA, and Cherry Hill, NJ.

Be sure to order a FREE copy of one of our books, Seven Ways to Destroy Your Pennsylvania Personal Injury Case or Seven Ways to Destroy Your New Jersey Personal Injury Case. The insurance company doesn’t want you to read either of these books!