North County Injury Blog

A Del Mar man was struck and killed Friday while trying to cross Centre City Parkway with a group of people. Escondido police said that 29-year-old Wesley Askins III died when he was struck at about 10:25 p.m. near the cross-street of Brotherton Road. Askins was thrown several yards by the collision, and was pronounced…

Tri-City Medical Center and Pomerado Hospital have been fined by the California Department of Public Health for medical mistakes that caused patient injury within the last year. A fine of $50,000 was assessed against each entity. At Tri-City, a patient was seriously burned when a cauterization machine ignited oxygen in a breathing mask and causing…

Four people were seriously injured, including a 12-year-old boy, in a head-on collision on State Route 76 near Escondido. The car accident closed the highway for more than an hour, and two helicopters were needed to transport the victims to the hospital. According to reports, a man driving a late model Toyota Camry westbound unexpectedly…

Car accidents caused by the use of cell phones while driving is starting to show up in statistics. Dave Downey of the Californian has a column this morning about the dangers of driving at night. While the number of people dying in car accidents has been falling over the last decade, the number of deaths…

A major car accident on Interstate 8 has claimed the lives of two people, and seriously injured a third. The accident occurred at approximately 2:30 a.m. Monday morning near what is called the Ocean Beach Freeway, where I-8 enters into the Mission Bay area. Details surrounding the accident are unclear, but witnesses say that one…

The California Department of Public Health issued warnings last week to avoid eating any alfalfa or clover sprouts distributed under the Wo Chong brand. Laboratory testing of the sprouts revealed they were contaminated with salmonella. “Consumers, especially infants, young children and the elderly, are susceptible to serious infection when exposed to Salmonella,” said Dr. Mark…

Tri-City Medical Center is probably in the news way more than it wants to be. For the last few years, the hospital has been the subject of much turmoil, from serious budget problems, to battles with unions, but it had hoped to move beyond all of that a year ago when it hired Larry Anderson…

Fatal motorcycle accidents fell by 16 percent in the first nine months of 2009 after rising steadily for the previous decade, a report just issued by the Governors Highway Safety Association found. The reasons for the sudden plunge in motorcycle deaths are unclear, but there was some speculation that current economic conditions were keeping motorcyclists…

Rancho Springs Medical Center and Inland Valley Regional Medical Center were informed by Medicare last week that they will lose Federal Medicare funding because of their repeated failure to follow basic care standards. The hospitals were also hit with hefty fines for serious healthcare related deficiencies. The decision by Medicare to end funding came after…

The San Diego Union Tribune is out with a story today about the risks elderly drivers pose behind the wheel, and the problem of “pedal misapplication.” What is pedal misapplication? An innocuous way of describing what happens when a driver accidentally hits the gas when they think they are applying the brakes. In the article…