Chicago Wrongful Death Law Blog

Despite aggressive law enforcement efforts and dedicated advocacy from organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), drunk driving remains one of the most dangerous causes of fatal car accidents in Illinois and the rest of the nation. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is pushing for a new proposal that could lower help prevent some of these accidents - a new national legal limit.

Currently, the legal limit is 0.08 percent blood alcohol content (BAC). The NTSB wants all 50 states to lower this limit to just 0.05 percent. A lower limit would serve two potential purposes: it would deter drivers from pushing the limits of impairment and it would allow police officers to take drivers off the road before they are dangerous enough to cause a deadly crash. 

Few if any observers would disagree that distracted driving - and especially phone-related distractions like texting or surfing the web - are playing a larger role in serious and fatal car accidents. Drivers in Chicago and around the nation often give in to the temptation to try to multi-task on the road, often with devastating results for other motorists.

Despite the common sense understanding that more people using phones while driving is a bad thing for public safety, the national statistics from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System ("FARS") have not shown a huge shift. Instead, FARS statistics still suggest that other distractions (including daydreaming and watching passing objects) cause dramatically more fatal crashes on American roads. 

A fear of hospitals is not uncommon. While seeking medical care is often a wise decision, some patients who go in to the hospital become sicker for doing so. In some cases, questionable safety practices lead to the spread of infection. Some of these infections can be very difficult to treat. 'Superbugs' is the term used to describe these difficult to treat infections. They can have a dramatic impact on victims and even be fatal under the wrong circumstances. Hospital acquired infections are a long-standing problem and hospitals vary widely in their success at preventing them.

Studies have suggested that approximately 5 percent of patients, 1 out of 20, develop infections that they did not have when they checked in to the hospital. These infections can exacerbate a fragile health condition or turn a minor medical issue into a serious problem. They lengthen hospital stays and cost patients and insurance companies massive amounts of money to handle. Hospital acquired infections have been linked to thousands of deaths annually. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 100,000 deaths per year can be tied to such infections.

Diagnosing a patient is a vital component of practicing medicine. Modern diagnostic tools have greatly enhanced the ability to properly identify the cause of an illness and allow for its rapid treatment. Unfortunately, errors in diagnosing patients remain the most common form of mistake to result in a successful medical malpractice claim. Diagnostic errors edged out treatment errors and surgical errors in a review of successful medical malpractice claims from the past 25 years. Missed diagnoses, mistaken diagnoses and delayed diagnoses were the basis of 29 percent of successful medical malpractice claims from 1986 to 2010.

Diagnostic errors were not only the most common type of mistake leading to a successful medical malpractice claim, they were also the most likely to involve a fatal result. Mistakes in diagnosis were the cause of 39 percent of all malpractice-related fatalities resulting in malpractice payments. Errors in diagnosis resulted in the second-highest average payment for successful claims, following only obstetrical claims. Diagnosis errors averaged $389,000 in payments whereas obstetrical claims averaged $695,000 in malpractice payments.