Below is an excerpt from testimony presented to the Georgia House of Representatives' Health & Human Services CANDOR Subcommittee in support of HB 807 on July 29, 2021.
Dr. LeCraw: First I want to say what an honor it is to present before this committee on the house, study committee, and the audience. Because you care so much about the health and wellbeing of your fellow Georgians.
Um, in the first part of my talk, I'm gonna be speaking in my role as a physician who has practiced anesthesia for over 35 years. So let me back up. Let me tell you a story. So Marilee and I, a few years back, were eating lunch and she told me about a time, a lecture she attended by a patient safety expert who presented a case where the, um, the nurse was taking care of an OB patient, had an epidural for labor.
The anesthesiologist had ordered IV antibiotics. She got the solution bag, which looked, you know, looked like IV antibiotics and hooked it up to the IV. A few minutes later she thought, oh my God, could that have been the IV anesthetics, which was supposed to have gone into the epidural IV?
Local anesthetics, or what you use to numb the patients, you give it through the epidural. She was really worried about it because if you give IV antibiotics in an IV, you can kill 'em. So she ran back to the room, but it was too late. The patient was dead. So Marilee said Florence, that happened to my husband, she said her husband's doctor, Fred Grover, who was an OBGYN, she said, fortunately for them, they had an anesthesiologist coming down the hall at the time that the patient arrested. So they were, um, able to resuscitate the patient. So she said, suffered no injury. So I looked at Marilee. I said, Marilee, that happened to me.
This transcription is drawn from testimony delivered by Florence Ruth LeCraw on July 29, 2021 at the Georgia House of Representatives' Health & Human Services CANDOR Subcommittee on HB 807. A full recording of this event can be found here.