North Carolina Product Liability Blog : North Carolina Product Liability Lawyer & Attorney : D. Hardison Wood : Toy Safety, Child Restraint, Car Seats

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published the results of a six-year, 10 hospital study conducted in North Carolina between 2002 and 2007.  The report can be found online for free here.  The study's authors included Dr. Christopher Landrigan, Dr. Gareth Parry, Catherine Bones, Andrew Hackbarth, Dr. Donald Goldmann, and Dr. Paul Sharek.

The study randomly selected 10 hospitals in NC to participate.  In those hospitals, researchers randomly pulled 10 patient admissions to the hospital for each quarter from 2002 to 2007.  Those records were then reviewed utilizing a "trigger tool" which allows researchers to quickly locate adverse events.  Those adverse events were then scrutinized to determine whether the harms were preventable or not preventable.

The authors of the study conclude:

In a statewide study of 10 North Carolina hospitals, we found that harm resulting from medical care was common, with little evidence that the rate of harm had decreased substantially over a 6-year period ending in December 2007.

That embarrassing conclusion was all the more a cause of concern for patient safety advocates since the authors of the report selected North Carolina hospitals for their "high level of engagement in efforts to improve patient safety."  Clearly, North Carolina hospitals have a long way to go before they live up to their reputation. 

Breakdown of the data and an interesting though experiment on the flip.

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District Judge James Selna of Santa Ana, CA made the tentative ruling from Nov 19, final allowing class action suits against Toyota to continue. Toyota and its attorneys tried to have the cases dismissed stating the plaintiffs failed to precisely plead specific losses or identify an actual defect. Judge Selna stated,

“It is true that plaintiffs do not generally allege the precise dollar value of their losses, but that level of specificity is not required at the pleadings state,” Selna said in yesterday’s ruling. “The court is convinced that a safety consideration as fundamental as whether a car is able to stop when the brakes are applied is material to consumers.”
Selna rejected Toyota’s request to dismiss a claim that the company knew of a defect in the vehicles’ electronic throttle- control system and concealed it from consumers.

‘Sufficiently Alleged’

“Plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged that Toyota had exclusive knowledge of material facts not known to plaintiffs and actively concealed those facts,” Selna wrote. (More)

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