Washington Injury Law Blog

60 Minutes aired a story about how Dennis Quaid’s newborn twin daughters were nearly killed after being given 1,000 times more blood thinning medicine than they should have.  Nurses gave Mr. Quaid’s daughters the adult version of a blood thinning medicine by mistake. The exact same medical error had killed 3 infants in the Midwest a year prior. Why does this potentially fatal medical error keep happening? 

100,000 people die each year as result of medical errors. That is more than breast cancer or car accidents cause each year. It’s the health care industries dirty little secret. Hospitals and doctors hide behind secret review meetings where the error is discussed but rarely – if ever – freely disclosed to the public. The public is kept in the dark in favor of profits over safety.

Drug companies and health care facilities need to work together to find better ways to guard against mixing up children’s medicines with adult. Better color coding of the labels could have prevented the 3 deaths and Quaid daughters ordeal. The drug maker eventually did this but the Quaid’s got caught before their hospital had used up the old medicine and brought in new with the better labeling.

We as citizens can help by demanding that our politicians make stopping repeated and preventable medical errors a priority and require better safe guards on drug distribution in health care facilities. So fatal medical errors do not keep happening over and over.