Legall Bug
Filed under: Negligence | Tags: attorney, attorneys, lawyer, lawyers, nursing home negligence
The ongoing challenge of improving the nation’s nursing homes continues and now there’s a new idea that could revolutionize the industry: cash incentives for well run facilities. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced a new, four-state project to test whether cash payments will help improve quality and efficiency in nursing homes.
Never before tried in such a large test, the program will award points to facilities based on a number of important criteria. These include nurse staffing levels, avoidable hospitalizations, resident outcomes and citations received during inspections.
Facilities will receive performance dollars based on points earned. Funding the performance payments will come from the dollars saved through quality and efficiency improvements.
Nursing homes in four states will be included in the demo program, including facilities in Arizona, Mississippi, New York and Wisconsin. Running from July 2009 until June 2012, Medicare policy may be altered based on the results.
Could this program be just what the industry needs? Time will tell. Performance based improvement measures have worked in a number of other industries.
Filed under: Birth Injuries, Malpractice | Tags: attorney, attorneys, birth injury, c-section, cesarean, lawyer, lawyers, medical malpractice
In recent years, birth injury law has been inundated with issues surrounding cesarean section birth. Exploding in popularity, this once rarely used procedure is a lightening rod for controversy and lawsuits. Why is it used so often in today’s medical community? Soaring malpractice premiums, technology that sometimes sets off false alarms, physicians pressed for time and mothers-to-be conflicted by fear.
In the past eight years alone, New York babies born by cesarean section increased 42 percent. And nothing is slowing down this rate, which is alarming many groups around the country, including The World Health Organization, which calls for a maximum cesarean section rate of 15 percent. Anything above that “seems to result in more harm than good,” according to a 2006 research summary in the British medical journal Lancet.
All the stakeholders, including physicians, midwives, childbirth experts and researchers say that because mothers are older, more obese, more prone to multiple births and less healthy, the surgical risks are higher, which encourages the “safer” procedure of a C-section. Others contend that overused interventions to induce and augment labor, manage pain and monitor for fetal distress have driven cesarean rates to unnecessary heights.
“Women are getting cheated by not being encouraged to believe both in their ability to birth and that birth can be a positive experience,” said Christie Craigie-Carter, Hudson Valley coordinator of the International Cesarean Awareness Network.
Many mothers out there are left wondering why they were given a cesarean, some even find out after the fact. These mothers, who wanted to experience vaginal birth, were forced to under go a procedure that they didn’t want. “There is an awful lot of lying to women about cesarean,” said Dr. Marsden Wagner. “All of those thousands of women who are getting unnecessary cesareans in New York State are at double or more risk of dying and the babies are at risk of dying.”
If you are one of these mothers and believe you have a birth injury or medical malpractice case due to a C-section procedure or other medical process, contact our New York City attorneys today. We are conveniently located in Manhattan.
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