Making it up as they go

Two stories which I read the other day caught my eye, both involving hospital errors.

In one story, a drug cabinet was incorrectly stocked with heparin instead of hep-lock and as a result, three preemies died. As the mother of a preemie, this story hit home. For the whole 51 days she was in the neo-natal intensive care unit, I, her mother, had so little say over what happened to her every day. As an employer in the medical field, I can imagine the anguish the pharmacy tech and nurses must be experiencing.

In the second story involving a fertility clinic, a man who provided a sperm sample to be used in his wife's fertility treatment found out that the sample had been mistakenly given to another woman who was supposed to receive sperm from an anonymous donor. The man is now suing to find out if a child resulted from the mistake. Two couples and possibly a child are all victims of this error and what a mess it will be to sort it all out, if in fact a child was born. During my first year of law school, we had to do a case study on the state of the law regarding surrogate mothers and their rights. It was readily apparent that technology was outpacing the law's ability to keep up. The courts, for the most part, are forced to make it up as they go.