Hospitals and surgery centers operate with a number of individuals taking responsibility for a variety of tasks. A surgeon’s reliance on others, however, for the pre-surgery review of medications can expose a patient to catastrophic injury.

Though wrong-sided surgeries have been exhaustively addressed through institutionalized precautions, they still happen. In one case, a surgeon’s stated trust in the patient apparently set in motion an ill-fated course.

The California Supreme Court recently adopted a wide view of when an accident in a hospital should be considered medical professional negligence instead of ordinary negligence.

In a long-awaited decision, the California Supreme Court has firmly rejected a common practice of injecting allegations of elder abuse into disputes over office-based medical care.  

In 2004, Elizabeth Cox saw a podiatrist at Pioneer Medical Group for a painful toenail infection.

The California Court of Appeal has upheld a hospital board’s decision to deny staff privileges to a physician with a history of sexual harassment even though the facility’s judicial review committee had found in favor of the physician joining the staff.