The State of California has fined Cedars-Sinai Medical Center $25,000 for giving overdoses of a blood thinner to three infants, including the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid.

The California Department of Public Health found that hospital personnel failed to follow their own procedures for safe medication use, and that resulted in what they called "preventable medication errors."

In November, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, then 10 days old, were given 1000 times the recommended dosage of Heparin, an adult-strength blood thinner, after they were hospitalized with an infection. The twins have since recovered completely.

Dennis and Kimberly filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of Heparin, Baxter Healthcare Corp., accusing the company of negligence in packaging different doses of the product in similar vials.

[TMZ]

Dennis Quaid and his wife, Kimberly Buffington and their twins are one of the luckiest families in the world. their twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, almost lost their lives as newborns. They pulled through and are now perfectly healthy, but in the beginning, it was a nightmare.

“[Mix-ups] happen in every hospital in every state in this country and … I’ve come to find out, there’s 100,000 people a year killed … in hospitals by a medical mistakes,” the 53-year-old actor tells 60 Minutes in a segment scheduled to air Sunday, CBS reports.

Last November, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid were mistakenly given a massive overdose of the drug Heparin, rather than Hep-tock, a much-weaker version of the drug routinely given to clear IV lines in pediatric patients.

“Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they’ve punctured,” says Quaid. “They were working on Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding – blood squirted across the room. It was blood everywhere. It was a life-and-death situation.”

The Quaids are suing manufacturer Baxter International, which manufactures both drugs. The couple maintain that the similarity between the vials have resulted in similar mix-ups elsewhere. A parallel incident in Indiana resulted in three infant fatalities that led Baxter to re-label its vials and issue a warning to hospitals.

“After these three kids died in Indiana, they did not issue a recall,” says Quaid. “They recall dog food that came from China last year. But they don’t recall medicine that kills people if you give it in the wrong dosage. We think it’s wrong.”

Debra Bello, a senior director at Baxter, tells 60 Minutes that her company did not issue a recall, “Because the product was safe and effective, and the errors, as the hospital has acknowledged, were preventable and due to failures in their system.”

Quaid is now establishing a foundation to look into preventative measures within the medical system. “The nurse didn’t bother to look at the dosage on the bottle. It was avoidable, completely avoidable.”

[ICYDK]

Dennis Quaid's four-month-old twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, are back to full health and are "doing great," following a drug overdose that left them battling for life.

The 'Day After Tomorrow' actor and his wife, Kimberly welcomed their twins into the world via a surrogate mother on November 8 at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Hospital staff accidentally gave Thomas and Zoe 1000 times the recommended dosage of the anti-coagulant drug Heparin. The Quaids subsequently sued the hospital.

Thankfully, the twins have made a full recovery. "We just lie around in bed with them and make funny faces and funny sounds and see how they react. They're starting to giggle, too," Quaid says. 

The actor also has a 15-year-old son, Jack Henry, from his marriage to Meg Ryan.

[FF]

Actor Dennis Quaid is accusing Cedars-Sinai hospital of trying to  cover up the error they made in giving his newborn twins an overdose of blood-thinner.

Quaid and wife, Kimberley Buffington, spent harrowing weeks while their son and daughter struggled to recover from a massive overdose of heparin they were given in the hospital's neo-natal unit. Thankfully, they are now fine.

But the actor maintains that he and his wife were told that Zoe Grace and Thomas Boone had been given only half the overdose they actually got. However, a state investigation by the California Department of Public Health found that the Quaid children, and one other unnamed baby, received two of the 10,000 unit vials. The 20-page report found that the drug overdose had put the babies in "immediate jeopardy," meaning it has caused, or was likely to cause, "serious injury or death…" 

The report incensed the Quaids. "We find it outrageous and totally unacceptable that we are learning for the first time… exactly what transpired," the couple said in a statement. "We were told by upper Cedars-Sinai administration that our children had received only one 10,000 unit dose of heparin when in fact they had received two 10,000 unit doses over an eight-hour period that we now know of. The hospital's lack of candour has left us with the uneasy feeling that we may never know the whole story," they said.

The Quaids have sued Baxter Healthcare, the makers of heparin, accusing the firm of negligence in packaging different doses of the product in similar vials.

The hospital had apologised to the families and said it has taken step to provide more training to staff and review all policies and procedures involving high-risk medication.

[The Press Association] 

Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington were in Santa Monica Christmas shopping yesterday. They seem very relaxed after their newborn twins were overdosed with Heparin in the hospital last month.

The couple has since filed a lawsuit againt the makers of the drug, Baxter Healthcare Corp.

Actor Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly Buffington welcomed twins via surrogate on November 8th. Now the poor babies are fighting for their lives after being inadvertently overdosed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles according to TMZ.

The twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, were accidentally given a massive dose of Heparin, an anti-coagulant used to flush out IV lines and prevent blood clots. Babies typically get 10 units. TMZ's sources say they were each mistakenly given 10,000. Could you imagine!

According to a TMZ source, the babies started "bleeding out" and are now given Protamine, which reverses the effects of Heparin.

As of the last update the babies are in the Cedar's neo-natal intensive care unit and are in stable condition. But get this; this is not the only incident. There have been 13 patients mistakenly given higher amounts of Heparin. Someone needs to investigate that hospital!

I hope all is well with these little babies.