Patient exposed to radiation at LA hospital sues
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a patient who was exposed to an overdose of radiation during a CT scan on Monday sued Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the maker of the scanner. Trevor Rees’s lawsuit, filed in Superior Court, seeks class action status on behalf of the 206 patients who received radiation overdoses because of an equipment error that went undetected for 1 1/2 years. The lawsuit claims the hospital’s staff and the scanner’s manufacturer, General Electric Healthcare, were negligent in performing the scans.
Hospital officials said the staff reset the machine’s computer to help doctors see blood flow in the brain and better diagnose strokes. However, “a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine” led patients to receive eight times the normal dose of radiation. About 40 percent of them lost patches of hair as a result.
Related posts:
