The toddler was checked into a Chicago hospital in December 2011 for relatively routine surgery to repair an undescended testicle. But the child suffered cardiac arrest after the operation and it took five minutes for medical personnel to respond. It was too long and too late. The child suffered brain damage due to oxygen deprivation.

More and more these days medical procedures are being outsourced by hospitals, sometimes to countries halfway around the world. On March 18, 2008, Sharron Juno was discharged from an Alabama hospital with her discharge summary – unknown to her treating physician — outsourced by the hospital and ultimately transcribed in India. The transcript and various

A new study reports that each year in the United States doctors commit more than 4,000 “never events” — the kind of medical mistake that should never happen. These errors include operating on the wrong part of the body or performing the wrong procedure or even performing surgery on the wrong patient altogether. Another common

A jury in Syracuse awarded $1.5 million in the case of a teacher and beloved coach at an upstate New York high school who killed himself while under the effects of antidepressants. The state Supreme Court jury found that Joe Mazella had been overmedicated and that negligent medical treatment contributed to his suicide in 2009. The

When doctors at an Ohio hospital finished colon surgery on a woman, they failed to notice that something was missing from the operating room that was there before – a towel. It was nearly five months after her June 2009 surgery before the location of the towel was discovered. It was inside the patient, 43-year-old