Current Retesting Procedures for Older Drivers May Not Prevent Accidents

A study released last month indicated to Los Angeles car accident lawyers that in California and around the country, there's substantial public support for mandatory retesting of elderly drivers above the age of 65. However, current retesting methods that exist in some states may do an inadequate job of actually gauging an older motorist’s ability to drive safely.

According to a study by Canadian researchers, medical tests that are used to determine an older driver’s levels of fitness, have got it all wrong. According to the researchers, there's only so much that you can learn about an individual's ability to drive in a doctor's office. In a doctor’s clinical environment, there's none of the chaos and confusion that an older motorist can expect to find on a normal California freeway. Besides, a doctor’s office doesn't provide the right kind of setting to determine whether elderly motorists can make sudden emergency decisions and speedy responses to accident risks as they have to in the real world. For instance, in a doctor’s office, it can be hard to determine whether the driver is able to drive safely, and still focus on the pedestrian stepping off a curb.

One of the biggest challenges facing elderly motorists is that they may be able to see things clearly, but may have trouble processing the signals that are transmitted to the brain. For instance, an elderly motorist may take up to 250 ms to recognize something that would take a younger motorist just about 150 ms to see. This delay in recognizing what could be a potentially serious accident risk could prove deadly on the street.

However, according to the researchers, it is possible to retrain certain areas of an elderly motorist’s brain, to make up for the missed activity in other areas of the brain. For instance, using practical techniques, older drivers can also be taught to multitask, using different areas of the brain while they are driving.

Patient Safety at Risk from Ignored Monitor Alarms

This is one problem that everybody from Arizona medical malpractice attorneys to doctors, hospitals and monitor manufacturers seem to agree is a serious one. However, there are no serious solutions to deal with the high numbers of patient injuries and deaths that occur every year from patient alarms that were neglected. According to estimates, between 2005 and 2010, approximately 200 people died as a result of ignored patient alarms.

A nurse on an average working day in an American hospital will have to deal with several monitor alarms. Many of these alarms are linked to the nurses’ cell phones and pagers, to make sure that they don't miss a single alarm. Ironically, the large number of alarms beeping continually desensitizes nurses to their sound, causing them to ignore the alarms, with possibly catastrophic consequences.

Everybody agrees that these incidents are preventable. The question is how to prevent them. Monitor manufacturers are working on sophisticated new technologies that can reduce the numbers of false alarms. There are efforts on to develop alarms that can more accurately gauge whether a person is in critical condition, before sounding an alert. Hospitals and doctors however, are not in favor of dependence on technology to determine whether a patient needs urgent help. Arizona hospital malpractice lawyers would agree. There seems to be only so much that medical technology can do to reduce what is known in the healthcare sector as “alarm fatigue.”

However, what hospitals can do to prevent such alarm fatigue is to employ more numbers of nurses. Many incidences where nurses ignore alarms can be traced to the fact that they're overstressed and have too many patients in their care at any given moment. If the numbers of patients assigned to a nurse can be reduced, there is a lower likelihood that a nurse will miss an alarm, due to desensitization.