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Administering medication in the emergency department (ED) or prescribing medication upon discharge exposes the ED physician to liability. When there are resultant complications, side effects, or injury as a result of a medication, lawsuits often are filed. This article will discuss the ED physician's duty to warn and will provide general guidelines on whether a pharmacist or a physician will assume liability in a given situation.
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When an admitted patient is boarded in the ED for extended periods, there may be confusion over who is responsible for the patientis it the ED physician, the hospitalist, the surgical specialist, or the medical specialist?
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One legal question is what standard of care the ED would be held to in the event of a lawsuit involving an admitted boarded patient's bad outcome.
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Did a surgeon examine your abdominal pain patient, or did a gastroenterologist give a second opinion on a complex issue? Unless this is documented appropriately, the ED physician may be the only one left "on the hook" if a bad outcome occurs.
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A 74-year retired veterinarian presents to the emergency department (ED) with shortness of breath. He was recently diagnosed with diffuse large-cell lymphoma with prominent abdominal lymphadenopathy and positive bone marrow and has been treated with two cycles of R-CHOP.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved denosumab for the prevention of skeletal-related events in patients with bone metastases from solid tumors.
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Rivaroxaban may be dabigatran's first competitor; a new way to measure non-adherence to medication therapy; FDA Actions.
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A trial undertaken by EORTC was designed to determine if neoadjuvant chemotherapy would be successful in the absence of post-surgical chemotherapy in enhancing overall survival in patients with locally advanced gastric cancer. The trial did not accrue sufficient numbers of patients to demonstrate a survival benefit. However, presurgical chemotherapy was associated with a higher rate of complete resection and fewer positive lymph nodes, features that suggest progression-free and overall survival might be favorably affected.
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In a retrospective review of consecutive patients with colon cancer, the presence of diabetes mellitus was found to confer negative prognostic information with regard to overall, and cancer-specific, survival. Notably, it was in patients with stage II disease that the presence of diabetes was of most importance.
