From the Lincoln Journal Star:

Parents sue state to get answers in daughter’s death
By DEENA WINTER
Lincoln Journal Star
Friday, Feb 13, 2009

At first, she was known only as Client 1.

An 18-year-old Beatrice State Developmental Center client had died.

Three hours after going into a seizure, she was dead.

She hadn’t had a seizure since 1999, when she began taking Klonopin to control them.

Her parents didn’t know it, but three days earlier, Beatrice staff had stopped giving her the medication, triggering what their attorney calls “a cascading series of medical errors.”

At about 3 a.m. on Jan. 16, her parents were awakened by the Pawnee County sheriff.

Client 1, as she was referred to in a state investigation, was dead.

But she had a name: Olivia Manes.

On Thursday, Tina and David Manes filed a $1.75 million claim against the state for wrongful death and the “pre-death terror, pain and suffering” of their daughter Olivia. They alleged at least 10 errors in her care.

A spokeswoman for the state declined to comment on the filing.

Tina and David learned Olivia had Dandy-Walker Syndrome when she was 2 months old. She was blind and mentally retarded. She never walked. She had 15 to 20 seizures per day.

They kept her home until she was 6 and it became clear they could no longer care for her. She had difficulty swallowing. Feeding her took a couple of hours. She wasn’t getting enough fluids.

Immediately, they knew where they wanted her to live.

David’s older brother, Mark, had Down Syndrome and lived at the Beatrice center.

“I grew up out there,” said David, a Beatrice native.

Tina said she felt guilty because she had “selfishly” kept Olivia at home longer than perhaps she should have. When she went to Beatrice, she was so small and possibly malnourished they could carry her like a toddler.

In Beatrice, she learned to eat, drink and swallow properly. She came to love eating.

She thrived, particularly after she began taking one tablet of seizure medicine daily. It was her lifeline.

She loved music especially Shania Twain and Christmas songs. She loved feeling the breeze on her face when someone pushed her wheelchair outside.

The Maneses and their son and another daughter live 39 miles away from Beatrice, in Steinauer. They visited Olivia at least weekly.

When she heard their voices, her mother said, she would light up and reach her hands out for a bear hug that could give you whiplash.

She loved to nestle her cheek next to yours, Tina said, crying at the memory.

They felt like she was meant to spread joy at Beatrice.

When they got the call telling them she’d died, they couldn’t understand how their girl, who hadn’t had a seizure since 1999, could be gone.

Two weeks after burying their daughter, the Maneses learned some of the heartbreaking details of Olivia’s death while watching the evening news.

“Nobody bothered to let us know,” Tina said of a report released to the media.

Nobody had told them staffers had stopped giving Olivia her seizure medicine. And although normally they’d get a call even when she had the sniffles or scraped her hand, nobody called when she began having seizures at 11:30 p.m. Jan. 15.

They weren’t told an ambulance picked her up two hours after the episode began. Once in the hospital, she was found to have pneumonia and a fever of 106 degrees.

Nobody had told the Maneses that no one checked Olivia’s vital signs while she was thrashing and seizing at the developmental center.

Tina breaks down when she thinks of her daughter suffering for hours “fighting for her life.”

Nobody called them to be with her daughter.

Nobody told them any of those things.

“We have never once gotten a call from BSDC,” Tina said. “Olivia was happy and healthy and besides having her syndrome, hasn’t had a seizure for 10 years.”

Last weekend, they got a phone call from Gov. David Heineman. He apologized that they had to learn the details of their daughter’s death on the news.

David said he talked to Heineman for about 90 minutes, explaining how he doesn’t blame the staff. He blames administrators for not properly training staff or being qualified to run the center.

He doesn’t think Heineman realized how severely disabled some of the people in Beatrice are.

“It seemed to me that he was out of touch,” David said.

He told the governor he thinks Beatrice should stay open and that group homes cannot provide the kind of services people like Olivia need.

The Maneses didn’t know until after Olivia died that the center had cut nursing staff on the night shift. They didn’t know, until they read a state investigation into her death, that not all staff was trained to handle seizures, even though 17 of the 18 people in Olivia’s unit had a history of them.

Despite all the negative publicity surrounding the Beatrice center “especially in recent years” the Maneses say they never saw the kind of abuse and neglect alleged by advocacy groups and inspectors.

The center is on the verge of losing $29 million annually in federal Medicaid funds due to abuse and neglect and failure to meet federal standards.

The Maneses used to pop in unannounced to make sure Olivia was being properly cared for and never saw problems.

“They were like family to us,” Tina said. “They’ve lost their little girl just like we have.”

And although they were often asked if they’d like to transfer Olivia to a group home or other community program, they always declined. They didn’t feel she would get the therapy and services she needed.

They believe the state made another mistake by removing 45 “medically fragile” Beatrice residents in the wake of Olivia’s death. Now those residents aren’t getting the kind of non-medical services they need, the Maneses say.

David’s brother still lives at the Beatrice center where he’s lived for 42 years. And that’s exactly where they want him to stay.

A jury awarded $25.8 million Friday to the family of a cancer patient who was given a wrong prescription, had a stroke and died several years later, lawyers said.

Beth Hippely was prescribed Warfarin, a blood thinner, in 2002 to treat breast cancer. The prescription filled at a Walgreens pharmacy was 10 times what her doctor prescribed, court documents said.

The Polk County Circuit Court jury found the prescription error caused a cerebral hemorrhage resulting in permanent bodily injury, disability and physical pain. The mother of three died in January at the age of 46.

A 19-year-old pharmacy technician, with little training, misfiled the prescription, according to court documents.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medication error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Arielle Newman, a cross-country runner at Notre Dame Academy on Staten Island, died after her body absorbed high levels of methyl salicylate, an anti-inflammatory found in sports creams such as Bengay and Icy Hot, the New York City medical examiner said Friday.

The medical examiner’s spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, said the teen used “topical medication to excess.” She said it was the first time that her office had reported a death from using a sports cream.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to the negligence of another, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

A federal jury on Tuesday awarded $5.5 million to the father of a man who died while wearing a drug patch made by two Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries.

The jury in Federal District Court in West Palm Beach found that Janssen Pharmaceutica Products and the Alza Corporation, both based in New Jersey, were liable in the death of Adam Hendelson, 28, who died in 2003 while wearing the companies’ Duragesic patch.

The patch delivers controlled doses of the powerful painkiller fentanyl.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to medical negligence, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

The widespread use of electronic systems to send prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies promises to prevent thousands of life-threatening medical errors, save billions of dollars in health care costs and even drive more business to drug stores.

Still, the vast majority of U.S. physicians have yet to adopt electronic prescribing, or e-prescribing, for the estimated 4 billion prescriptions they write annually, a situation that a phalanx of corporations and the government are working to change. One coalition promoting e-prescribing estimates that as many as 20 percent of the 550,000 practicing U.S. physicians had the technology to send e-prescriptions, but that only 5 percent actually have been using it.

With e-prescribing, physicians can use hand-held or desktop computers or “smart” mobile phones to send patient drug prescriptions to pharmacy computers.

Beyond conveying prescriptions, systems can alert doctors to potential drug interactions or dosing problems, eliminate handwriting errors, automate the time-consuming renewal process, provide data on a patient’s drug plan, and potentially cut thousands of pharmacy calls to doctors. Hospitals, insurers, technology companies, regional collaboratives and pharmacies have been working to advance adoption of e-prescribing.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications – his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy – and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical mistake, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

“In total,” the Post reports, “85 percent of these drug errors were not spotted until the child received the medication, according to a study led by Dr. Marlene Miller, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. These errors do not always cause harm to the child, the authors added, but they are always worrisome.”

As expected, human error accounts for the vast majority of these types of medical mistakes:

Surprisingly, prescribing errors accounted for just one in 10 cases. Most errors (48 percent) involved mistakes in administration, followed by errors in dispensing (30 percent). The most commonly cited types of error were mistakes in dose or quantity (23 percent), or time of administration (23 percent), followed by omission errors (that is, failing to deliver the drug at all, 14 percent) and improper administration technique or route (12 percent). By far the biggest cause of error was “performance deficit” — human error — at 41 percent.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.