A state police trooper currently stationed at the South Yarmouth barracks, John McCormack is accustomed to working within a chain of command and respecting authority.
So when his 1-year-old daughter, Taylor, ended up at Children's Hospital Boston, he let the doctors take charge.
It's a decision, McCormack says, he lived to regret.
Within hours of her arrival on Sept. 30, 2000, Taylor was in a coma. In less than a week she was dead.
In a case that's been publicized in the press and now in a book, it turned out that the resident in charge delayed crucial emergency surgery to repair Taylor's brain shunt because he couldn't contact the attending surgeon by pager. The surgeon said he had set his pager to vibrate and fallen asleep.
Nobody tried to contact him by home phone or cell phone. The resident told the McCormack family that other surgeries were tying up the operating room — a statement that was later proved untrue.
"They played Russian roulette with my daughter," McCormack says. "They looked us in the face and they lied to us."
Taylor's story and 10 others are profiled in a new book about deadly hospital errors, "Fatal Care: Survive in the U.S. Health System."
The stories range from a healthy teenage boy who died after receiving an overdose of a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug after routine surgery to a man who died of a heart attack after emergency room staff ignored his wife's frantic calls for help.
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080619/LIFE/806190301
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It sounds like a situation with which I was involved in one of my residencies. I tried to contact one of my attendings about one of his patients, about 11PM. He did not answer his phone. I suspect he disconnected his phone at night, when not on call, to avoid disturbances. He had previously asked me to monitor this patient that night. Fortunately, the patient was never in extreme danger.
The post does not say whether or not the Surgeon with the vibrating pager was held accountable. I wonder if the story of the vibrating pager was an excuse on the part of the surgeon.
One aspect of medical errors which is not discussed is who is held accountable. Often, when a senior physician is responsible for an error, the senior physician is supported and some subordinate is intimidated to take a fall. This happened to me more than once when I was practicing.
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