Medical Malpractice

In an elder abuse case described by one investigator as the most outrageous he has ever seen, three former top managers at a Kern County nursing home have been arrested in the deaths of three residents who allegedly were given needless doses of psychotropic medications. The state attorney general's office contended in a criminal complaint that more than 20 residents at a skilled nursing center run by the Kern Valley Healthcare District were drugged "for staff convenience."

Los Angeles County supervisors have agreed to pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the children of Edith Rodriguez, the woman who died after writhing in pain for 45 minutes on the waiting-room floor of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. Rodriguez's death nearly two years ago attracted national attention, becoming a symbol of an indifferent emergency system.

The UC Board of Regents have quietly settled a dozen lawsuits stemming from fertility fraud uncovered nearly 15 years ago -- drawing closer to an end a scandal that has dogged UC Irvine and left behind dozens of heartbroken couples. Shirel and Steve Crawford recently deposited their $675,000 settlement, minus legal fees, but it brought them little peace. In the late 1980s, in the midst of what many consider the country's worst fertility scandal, the Crawfords believe their embryos were given to a woman referred to in documents as "Mrs.

After a vigorous debate among experts, the state medical board this week dismissed accusations of negligence against a perinatologist at Kaiser Permanente's Fresno Medical Center who was involved in two tragic deliveries. The Medical Board of California had accused Dr. Hamid Safari of mishandling the procedures. One child died in the delivery room in April 2005, and the other died months after her January 2004 birth.

State officials have fined two nursing homes in Orange County for providing care so inadequate that it led to the deaths of two patients. In one case, a woman died from dehydration. In the other, staff failed to provide CPR to a man suffering a heart attack because they mistakenly believed he was under orders not to be resuscitated.

President Obama on Wednesday night called for a new look at how medical malpractice lawsuits were handled as a possible way of containing spiraling healthcare costs. During his address to Congress, Obama said that fears of lawsuits had driven doctors to practice "defensive medicine," which some think has led to expensive and unnecessary medical tests and procedures. "I don't believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs," Obama said.

Before actor Dennis Quaid went to bed Nov. 18, he gave one last call to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his newborn twins were being treated for staph infections. "Oh, they're fine," Quaid recalled a nurse telling him about 9 p.m. "They're just fine." Actually, they weren't. Earlier that day, nurses had mistakenly given Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin.

If Kaiser Permanente's Fresno hospital had acted on complaints and kept a closer watch over its medical staff, two babies might still be alive, federal health inspectors concluded in a report released this week. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began investigating the hospital in October, two days after the Los Angeles Times reported that doctors and nurses had complained repeatedly to higher-ups about perinatologist Hamid Safari's medical and interpersonal skills.

By the time paramedics arrived, the patient was lying in a pool of her own blood, her pulse racing and her blood pressure dangerously low. The woman, identified only as Angela P. in records of the Medical Board of California, had gone to the Clinica Medica Para la Mujer de Hoy in Santa Ana in the summer of 2004 for an abortion. Dr.

No one in the courtroom Wednesday suggested that Ruben Navarro could have avoided death for long. But whether the severely retarded, comatose 25-year-old was nudged into it by an impatient transplant surgeon is at the core of a legal proceeding unprecedented in the United States. Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 34, has been charged with three felonies in Navarro's 2006 death.