Hollywood FL Personal Injury Law Blog
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Workers' Compensation on Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Broward County residents know that some jobs are more dangerous than others, and employers and co-workers have a legal responsibility to do their part in making the workplace reasonably safe. With that in mind, readers in Florida may be interested to hear of a unique workplace accident that sadly resulted in the death of an employee and a horse she was working to rehabilitate.
The Florida facility where the fatal accident occurred uses a hyperbaric chamber to rehabilitate or condition horses. Such a chamber creates extremely high pressure, and certain workplace precautions should always be taken to prevent serious personal injury. According to witnesses, a horse inside the chamber began kicking and knocked off a part of the equipment, revealing metal inside the chamber. The steel-shoed horse then kicked again, striking the exposed metal and causing a spark that increased the pressure inside the chamber.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Nursing Home Neglect on Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Nursing home abuse in Florida happens all-too-often, and the vast majority of victims are incapable of defending themselves. When an employee at a nursing home alters the specific medical treatment of a resident, then the proper procedures have to be taken to ensure that the change is safe. With these issues in mind, readers in the Fort Lauderdale area may want to consider the case of a Florida nurse who is charged with intentionally giving the wrong medication to a disabled patient.
The nurse's arrest came after an investigation by the Florida Attorney General's Medicare Control Fraud Unit. The nurse is accused of administering an anti-psychotic drug -- Risperdal -- instead of the pain medication -- Oxycodone -- for which the disabled patient had a prescription. The investigation revealed that the unauthorized drug change caused the nursing home patient to develop a large blister on his scalp and suffer stomach pains.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Car Accidents on Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Usually, in Fort Lauderdale and throughout Florida, city planners put a lot of effort into implementing traffic signals such as lights and road signs to help lessen the chance of personal injury. However, negligent or reckless drivers too often ignore or fail to obey the rules of the road. When this happens, the threat of a car accident is increased exponentially, as is the chance for serious personal injury.
Recently, just such a failure to properly heed traffic directives resulted in a total of six people being injured in Broward County. Sadly, the person who suffered the most serious injuries was a 6-year-old boy who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Workers' Compensation on Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Florida residents likely know that construction sites can be dangerous places. However, every worker should expect a reasonable amount of safety on the job, regardless of what the job is. To that end, employers have certain obligations to take safety precautions and provide proper safety training to employees to help prevent workplace accidents. Otherwise, the risk of serious injury is increased exponentially.
With these issues in mind, readers may want to consider a 31-year-old Florida construction worker who was critically injured in what must have been a terrifying and traumatic construction site accident. The accident happened in Hollywood, and according to local police officers and rescue workers, the man had to be removed from a hole that had been filled with wet concrete.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Medical Malpractice on Monday, January 23, 2012
A teenager from Miramar suffered intestinal ailments as a newborn. As a result, her spleen and other organs had to be removed. As readers in Fort Lauderdale may know, the spleen functions to filter out bacteria and viruses. Thus the girl was required to receive special medicine to prevent infections. In 1998, her mother took her to the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine for a pediatric checkup. There, a medical assistant injected the girl with an anti-infection vaccine for people without a spleen. But, as it turns out, the vaccine had expired five months prior.
The medical error resulted in the girl's becoming seriously ill eight months later, when she was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Blood clots had formed in her arms and legs because of a bacterial infection. According to the girl's attorney, who filed a medical malpractice lawsuit 10 years ago, "She developed the very disease they were supposed to inoculate her against."
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Wrongful Death on Tuesday, January 17, 2012
A Florida woman was killed recently after police forced two intoxicated men to leave a beach but failed to ensure that the men wouldn't be driving. In a public statement, the family of the woman blamed ineffective public drinking laws and the sheriff's deputies on the scene for failing to prevent one of the drunken men from driving and fatally injuring the 53-year-old jogger, a mother of three.
The woman's sister-in-law directed her criticism at the police in the form of a poem, which ends with the line, "Because you didn't bother, your lack of action caused her end."
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Nursing Home Neglect on Monday, January 9, 2012
According to an investigative news report, the Agency for Healthcare Administration has given out over $23 million since 2007 to almost 90 assisted living facilities that have official track records of neglect or abuse. As a major regulator in Florida, the agency has the power to apply a range of punishments for nursing homes and assisted living facilities when they neglect or abuse residents. Instead, the agency has consistently failed to use one of its most effective enforcement tools -- to deny funds.
For example, Florida regulators discovered that, after a 71-year-old man with mental illness died after being left in a tub of scalding water, the responsible facility could have been denied thousands of state dollars sent to the home annually. However, the regulating agency only fined the home.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Medical Malpractice on Tuesday, January 3, 2012
According to a recent study, insurance rates for Florida doctors have declined roughly 8 percent on average, but those benefits have not yet impacted patients. The study, which was commissioned by the James Madison Institute, points out that there is still "no mechanism in place to mandate a reduction in the patients' health-care costs when providers realize savings."
The lower insurance rates for physicians have resulted from years of medical-malpractice reforms, and now an advocacy group is demanding that compensation law also be overhauled. Patients for Fair Compensation have proposed a large-scale reform to create a system similar to workers' compensation. The system would adjudicate medical malpractice claims and help prevent the practice of "defensive medicine." Defensive medicine consists of ordering needless medical tests and procedures for the sole purpose of protecting against medical malpractice litigation. According to the chairman of Patients for Fair Compensation, Florida spends about $25 billion per year on defensive medicine.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Car Accidents on Monday, December 26, 2011
Not only do drivers in Broward County have a responsibility to do their best to make the roadways as safe as possible; city officials and local law enforcement also have a duty to ensure that roads are properly maintained and that street lights and other traffic directives are properly functioning. The dangers of becoming the victim of a car accident are serious enough when motorists drive in a negligent or reckless manner. But when roads aren't maintained and traffic signals fail to protect, the combination of dangerous factors all but guarantees an injury.
One such unfortunate combination happened in Coral Springs about three months ago, when a teenage boy suffered fatal injuries after a truck broadsided the vehicle that was carrying him. The crash occurred at an intersection where the traffic lights were set to blink at night. Now Broward County traffic engineers have made changes to the lights, which will no longer blink, no matter the time. Presumably, the blinking lights are thought to have been a contributing factor in the crash.
On behalf of The Law Offices of David M. Cohen, P.A. posted in Car Accidents on Monday, December 19, 2011
Federal safety investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently declared that texting, emailing or talking on a cell phone while driving are behaviors that should be outlawed because of they are so dangerous to human life. The investigators encouraged all states to ban such activity except in emergency situations. Otherwise, talking on a cell phone while driving should be made illegal, said the board, as over and over such behavior has been shown to cause serious car accidents.
Florida is still one of 15 states that have not yet placed any bans on texting while driving. The other 35 states, plus the District of Columbia, have outlawed texting while driving because evidence has shown the practice to be extremely distracting and often fatal. The NTSB even recommends making the use of hands-free devices illegal while driving, as that practice has also been shown to be dangerous on the road.
