Patient safety experts at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere are taking their prescription for avoiding medical errors in hospital care one step beyond already successful "no fault, no blame" approaches, calling now for penalties for doctors and nurses who fail to comply with proven safety measures.

Imagine a debt collector visiting sick people who owe money, coming up to their bedsides in hospital, and you might think that this was a description of a new movie - it is not; it really does happen. Debt collectors, according to the Minnesota Attorney General, Lori Swanson, have ...

Results of a survey published in a research letter in JAMA this week, reveal that sexual misconduct and prescribing without an established clinical relationship are among the most common ever reported online violations of professionalism by doctors in the US. For their survey, Dr S. Ryan ...

Contrary to the common perception among physicians that poor people sue doctors more frequently, Ramon L. Jimenez from the Monterey Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Institute and his team demonstrate that socioeconomically disadvantaged patients, in fact, tend to sue physicians less often. Their work suggests that this myth may exist because ...

A study in the March issue of Anesthesiology, revealed that anesthesiologists over the age of 65 years had more frequent litigations and were linked to a higher severity of patient injury. Lead researcher, Michael J. Tessler, M.D. said: "We observed a modest but significant increase in the rate ...

When dentists do a root canal they are supposed to use steel posts, and definitely not paper clips. A dentist from Massachusetts has just received a 1-year prison sentence at the Bristol County House of Correction, for using paper clips for just such procedures - he had faced charges of ...

An extensive misconduct investigation that took three years to complete and produced a 60,000-page report, concludes that a researcher who has come to prominence in recent years for his investigations into the beneficial properties of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, "is guilty of 145 counts of ...

Given that many medical tests are nowadays rapidly performed at the patient's bedside compared with tests that required sending samples to a laboratory and waiting for results, last month's special issue of Point of Care: The Journal of Near-Patient Testing & Technology reveals that as more of these point-of-care testing ...