Boston Medical Malpractice and Workers' Compensation Blog

During your stay at a Massachusetts hospital, you probably encountered numerous medical professionals and staff members who came in and out of your room for one reason or another. However, those with whom you had the most contact, day and night, were nurses.

You recognized that there were some nurses who loved their jobs and others who were tired, some who seemed to have a handle on the situation and others who were less confident. Unfortunately, one or several of your nurses did not chart well, and this placed your health and recovery at serious risk.

In 2016, a woman suffering a severe asthma attack collapsed only feet away from a locked door leading to a Massachusetts emergency room. She later died of what would normally be an easily treatable condition.

This week, the woman's widow received an in-person apology for the hospital's lapse from the facility's parent company's chief executive officer. The Cambridge Health Alliance CEO met with the man at The Boston Globe's headquarters for two hours. He expressed that he was "very sorry" for what took place in the early morning hours of on Sept. 16, 2016.

Patients put their faith — and their lives — in their doctors' hands every day. We trust that their skills and accumulated knowledge will be sufficient to diagnose and treat what ails us.

But what happens when the doctors are wrong? Diagnostic errors can kill patients by hastening their deaths from often-treatable conditions. The errors also prolong suffering and cause unnecessary anxiety and fear in patients and also their loved ones.

According to federal investigators, the trigger for the series of deadly gas explosions in and around Lawrence last month was Columbia Gas of Massachusetts' failure to move from an abandoned pipe an underground pressure sensor while construction work was taking place in Lawrence.

As a result, the gas flowed into the local network. Explosions and fires rocked towns all over the Merrimack Valley. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined the utility didn't inform the construction crew about the need to either move or detach the pressure sensor. As a result, the sensor detected decreased pressure in the abandoned line. It sent a signal to the control station to flood the system with dangerously high levels of gas.