If this story is true, one hospital needs to undertake some serious retraining of its security staff.

Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, Maryland, is being sued after a series of “misunderstandings” regarding one patient.

According to court documents, Joseph Wheeler, 46, was brought by ambulance to Prince George’s after a car accident on June 23. He was treated for blunt torso trauma but no other acute injuries.

The next morning, Wheeler awoke to a nurse informing him that he was going to be prepped for surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass from his chest. Soon after, Wheeler noticed his hospital-issued ID bracelet indicated he was a 33-year-old woman.

No longer feeling secure with his treatment at the hospital, Wheeler and his wife gathered his belongings and started to leave. According to the complaint Wheeler filed, two security guards detained him, called him a “bitch” repeatedly, shoved him into a wall and then took him into an elevator where they beat him while he was on the floor in a fetal position.

Eventually, Wheeler spoke to a hospital administrator who had him sign a release that he was leaving against medical advice.

Wheeler went to nearby St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was treated for four broken ribs, a sprained shoulder, a ruptured spleen and a concussion.

The Wheelers have filed suit for $3.2 million in compensatory damages and $9.5 million in punitive damages. So far, the hospital hasn’t commented publicly on the case.

In the five years since the disaster, 80% of the city’s population has come back — but the health care system is only at roughly 50% of its former capacity.

Large sections of the city have been without a hospital since the floods, meaning residents dealing with a medical emergency may face a 20+ minute drive to the nearest hospital. In particular, New Orleans East may not see its main health care facility, Methodist Hospital, reopen for another three years.

Those neighborhoods with existing hospitals frequently have to make do with smaller hospitals that offer fewer services.

Plans are in the works to build or renovate several medical facilities. Among them: a $775 million project to replace Training Hospital and the large LSU-VA Hospital in Mid-City.

Short answer: No.

A recent study found that doctors who trained overseas and were not U.S. citizens when they entered medical school, had significantly lower mortality rates among their patients, compared to U.S. citizens trained in the U.S. and U.S.-born doctors who trained overseas.

The study looked at more than 244,000 hospitalizations in Pennsylvania, for patients suffering from heart attacks or congestive heart disease.

New research reveals that orthopedic surgeons who have an interest in specialty hospitals or ambulatory surgical centers are more likely to schedule patients for surgery. Significantly more. Patients treated by an owner-doc were 54% to 129% more likely to have carpal tunnel repair, 33% to 100% more likely to have rotator cuff repair, and 27% to 78% more likely to have arthroscopic surgery.

Federal law doesn’t allow physicians to refer Medicare and Medicaid patients to centers that the doctor has an ownership stake in. And most states have similar laws to protect private insurance patients.

But those laws don’t include specialty facilities or ambulatory surgical centers.

The study, which appears in the Archives of Surgery, looked at patients treated in Idaho between 2003 and 2007.

When provided with in-person, professional interpreters, patients who have limited-to-no English reported higher satisfaction in communicating with their health care provider. The treating physicians and nurses reported similar satisfaction.

While many hospitals have tried to accommodate patients by training employees in languages commonly seen in their ER — using patient family members to translate or providing phone/headphone-based interpreting services — the study found these all fell short when compared to on-site professional interpreters.

In fact, when patients had access to professional interpreters, patients, doctors and nurses were four times more likely to say they were satisfied with the interaction.

Researchers also found that patients with professional interpreters had shorter stays in the ED and had generally better outcomes.

The study was published in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Unlike other safety-critical industries like aviation and nuclear power insist on having multiple precautions and fail-safes in place to ensure that workers can’t commit a fatal error over a momentary lapse such as hitting the wrong button.

But nurses and other health care providers have no such safety net when it comes to the tangle of tubes that may be hooked up to a typical patient. Rather than use color-coded tubing or incompatible hook-ups, most of the tubes used for blood, medication, food, etc. are identical.

That makes it all too easy for a nurse or other health care provider to accidentally grab the wrong line and push liquid nutrition into a vein or IV fluids into tubes meant to deliver oxygen.

Several hundred such errors are known to have lead to patients’ death (and many more caused severe injuries in patients who survived). Experts believe that due to under-reporting the actual numbers of patients affected are much higher. A 2006 survey found that 16% of all hospitals had experienced at least one feeding-tube-related error.

Why does this problem persist? Most experts blame lax oversight by the FDA and successful efforts by manufacturer organizations to slow efforts to create more stringent standards.

One basic move would be to make feeding tubes incompatible with tubes meant for the skin or veins. The FDA is currently reviewing that plan as well as related suggestions to make the tubing safer for both patients and their caregivers.

A new study from the American Medical Association looked into which doctors — by gender, age, specialty, etc. — are most likely to get sued or have other liability claims against them.

The report (downloadable) makes interesting — if sometimes maddening — gawking material. For example, a review of the records found that 65% of claims are dropped or dismissed, and another 30% are settled or decided via an alternate dispute method. Only 5% of claims actually go to court — of those, 90% are decided for the physician.

Even a win can be costly, however: Average costs to defend against a claim were just under $40,700. For claims that were dropped or withdrawn, it cost an average of just over $22k to defend; cases that go to trial average more than $100k to defend.

More frustrating: The rate of claims seems to have little correlation to actual malpractice. The AMA researchers found that among closed claims, 3% of patients hadn’t suffered any injury and in another 37%, there had been no error.

Worse: Many injured patients and wrongly accused doctors don’t get true justice. The researchers found that 27% of claims are paid despite the doctor not making an error. At the same time, 27% of patients who suffered from an error receive no compensation.

By the numbers

A doctor’s specialty, type of practice and even gender play a role in how likely he or she is to face liability claims.

Not surprisingly, the study found that the specialties with the highest rate of claims were general surgery and obstetrics/gynecology, with nearly 70% of physicians in those specialties facing suits during their careers.

Least likely to face claims: pediatricians and psychiatrists. Less than 30 percent of doctors in these specialties were sued during their careers.

The study also found that the type of practice can increase a doctor’s risk of being sued. Among physicians in solo practices or single specialty group practices, 45% faced lawsuits in their careers. The rate was only 40% for physicians working in hospitals, and 37% for doctors in multi-specialty group practices. Owners of practices are also more likely to be sued than employees.

Male doctors are twice as likely to be sued. In part, because they are concentrated in specialties with high rates of claims and are more likely to own their practices. The researchers noted that other studies indicate differences in interpersonal skills may contribute to some of the gender gap in lawsuits, but the data is difficult, at best, to quantify.

As more Americans reach even higher levels of obesity, more expectant mothers are finding their additional weight is a strain not only on them, but on their doctors’ and hospitals’ capabilities, as well.

Many hospitals have had to buy sturdier equipment, including wider, stronger beds and longer surgical instruments to get through the layers of fat. In addition, when working with morbidly obese maternity patients, doctors have to perform more detailed tests (using more expensive equipment) earlier in the pregnancy — both because of the potential risks to mother and baby, and because they’ll lose the ability to adequately perform some tests as the pregnancy progresses and the mother’s size increases.

While those tests and extra equipment are expensive, the highest costs are borne by the mother and baby — both face a variety of significantly increased health risks.

Some hospitals are considering opening special units dedicated to treating obese maternity patients. Along with standard obstetric care, the units would provide nutritional counseling. Other services would include emergency C-sections and neo-natal intensive care.

Still poorly understood, hospital delirium is being seen (or, perhaps is now more likely to be recognized) in patients. Patients experiencing delirium are often reluctant to discuss it, but have described terrifying scenarios, intense anxiety, disorientation and a feeling that they need to escape the hospital. It’s more common than many health care providers realize — up to one-third of patients over the age of 70 experience it.

And while it was once believed to be a temporary, if unpleasant, occurrence, doctors have found that delirium patients have more complications and generally poorer long-term prognoses.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the patients most at risk aren’t limited to those who already have dementia. Risk factors/triggers include: recent surgery, invasive procedures such as catherization, pneumonia and infection. Some medications, especially sleep aids and those which are poorly metabolized by geriatric patients, have been associated with the syndrome.

The condition can be exacerbated by some of the common patient complaints of hospitalization: constant interruptions that keep patients from sleeping, not having needed eyeglasses/hearing aids with them, changing rooms, losing their daily routine, limited social contact, etc.

The long-term consequences are troubling: Patients with hospital delirium may have needed treatments delayed due to the condition, face more complications, are more likely to later develop dementia, and have higher death rates. It’s believed the delirium puts the patient in a more fragile state that makes other complications more likely.

Prevention programs that keep patients on a daily routine, ensure they have glasses and hearing aids and monitor medications more closely have had some success in reducing the rates of hospital delirium.

The John Cochran VA Medical Center has alerted approximately 1,800 veterans that they may have been exposed to a variety of viruses due to dental equipment that wasn’t cleaned properly.

Affected vets are those who were treated at the St. Louis facility during a 13-month period that ended in March. A routine inspection in March detected the problem.

The center said in a statement that the risk of disease transmission is still very low. It’s offering free blood tests for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C to affected veterans.