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Maclaren Stroller Recall: Free Repair Kit Costs More Than Its Worth

Steven Schafer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT

On November 9, 2009, Maclaren USA, the American subsidiary of the British manufacturer of umbrella strollers and other children’s products, “voluntarily” recalled about 1 million strollers because of fingertip lacerations and amputations. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “The stroller’s hinge mechanism poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding [or] opening the stroller.”

Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

My last article focused on the purported “voluntary” aspect of the recall and questioned how Maclaren was gathering and maintaining reports of accidents and near-accidents. This article will focus on the manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen. My next article will speak to what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Manufacturer’s Legal Duty. Under the law, a manufacturer is responsible for acting reasonably - or exercising "due care" - in designing, manufacturing and testing a product to make sure that the product is fit for a particular purpose. If there is an unsafe aspect to the product that results in injuries to the person using it, or someone close by, the manufacturer can be held responsible for the injuries on the basis of negligence, or for having breached express and implied warranties about a product’s fitness. A manufacturer must anticipate the environment in which its product will be used, taking into account the sophistication and knowledge of the operator or consumer, the location where a product will be used, and the foreseeable uses and even misuses to which the product may be placed. The manufacturer must design against reasonably foreseeable risks of injury in this context.

So, in the case of a children’s stroller, a manufacturer must anticipate that a child may place his or her hand or fingers on the stroller’s frame when a parent or caregiver is opening or closing the stroller. Just think of the mother with two or three children in tow, who is setting up or collapsing a stroller next to the family car in the parking lot at the mall. She has children to watch, bundles to handle, and traffic to look out for, all while she is opening and closing the stroller. There should be no possibility that the stroller’s hinge mechanism will allow a toddler’s finger to get in the way. Mom, dad, grandma or the babysitter cannot be held to the level of expertise of the design engineer and should not have to inspect the stroller to make sure that there are no areas where the child’s hands or fingers can be caught or pinched. We protect industrial workers by eliminating or covering exposed gears and moving parts on machinery; a stroller should be designed with no less concern for safety.

Manufacturer’s Design Responsibilities. Hazard and risk analysis has become a staple of mechanical engineering. When studying safety engineering, students learn the so-called "safety hierarchy" of design, which is intended to identify, and then eliminate or reduce the risk of injury from a hazard posed by a product.

The design engineer must identify hazards (such as a pinch point, where parts of a product can catch a part of the body and cause injury) and evaluate the chances of an injury occurring, and the severity of the injury.

Once a risk of injury has been identified, the design engineer should try to eliminate the risk entirely, by reconfiguring that part of the product. When it comes to a hinge mechanism into which little fingers can fit, perhaps the space is made larger so that fingers cannot be pinched when the hinge is opened and closed. Or, perhaps the space is made smaller so that a finger cannot possibly fit into the space.

If the risk of injury cannot be eliminated by a change in design, then the engineer should try to guard against the risk. A permanent, non-removable hinge cover might work in this instance.

If the risk of injury cannot be eliminated by a design change, or guarded against by a cover, then the designer may resort to warnings or instructions. There is a science to proper warnings and instructions. They must first alert the user with attention getting words that are commensurate to the hazard (such as DANGER in yellow against a black background, or WARNING in red and white, or CAUTION in orange and black). A proper warning should then alert the user to the hazard (such as "In-Running Rollers" or "Sharp Blade"). A proper warning should tell the user what to do or what not to do (like "Keep Hands Away from Opening") to avoid the hazard. And finally, a proper warning should tell the user the consequences if he or she disregards the warning (for example, "Placing Hands in Vicinity of In-Running Rollers May Result in Amputation or Other Serious Injury").

Legalistic warnings and instructions may give the manufacturer an argument in court, but do little to communicate to the consumer the information he or she needs to use a product safely. Warnings like “Be Careful” do not communicate necessary information.

While a manufacturer might argue that warnings and instructions are unnecessary and that the hazard is obvious or a matter of common sense, a proper warning (when the hazard cannot be eliminated by a design change or when a guard or cover will not work) might say:

WARNING

AMPUTATION POINT! OPENING IN HINGE MECHANISM MAY ACCOMMODATE A CHILD’S FINGERS

KEEP YOUR CHILD’S HANDS AND FINGERS OFF FRAME AND AWAY FROM HINGE MECHANISM WHEN OPENING AND CLOSING STROLLER

YOUR CHILD’S FINGERS MAY BE AMPUTATED OR SEVERELY CUT IF THEY ARE IN THE HINGE MECHANISM WHEN STROLLER IS OPENED OR CLOSED

Even the best warnings and instructions, however, don’t take the place of good design that eliminates the hazard and risk of injury altogether, and they don't substitute for a guard when the good design cannot eliminate the hazard and risk of injury.

Maclaren has chosen to guard against the risk of injury by offering a "free repair kit," consisting of hinge covers for the pinch points where a child's finger can be cut or amputated. The hinge covers appear to be made of cloth and snap onto the frame. A cover that easily snaps in place can also be easily removed, yet the unsafe pinch point remains. From a design standpoint, a guard or cover that can be easily removed without disabling the product, is inadequate. One must be concerned for the next family that inherits the stroller and who may be unaware of the covers’ importance, or that the covers will be removed once they get dirty. (Doesn’t Maclaren realize that peanut butter and jelly and many other substances are inherent to this product’s expected environment of use?)

The "free repair kit" might be worth just what Maclaren is charging for it, and a lot less than the $2 per stroller that Maclaren is reportedly spending on the kit.

What should a parent do?

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Bedrails can kill patients

Steven Schafer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:27:36 GMT

Despite federal safety regulations and an increased awareness of the dangers of using bedrails at long-term care facilities and hospitals, patients continue to die from suffocation, strangulation or asphyxiation.

How do these tragedies occur?

One way is when patients slip through a gap between the mattress and the bottom of the raised bedrail, their heads get stuck, and they strangle to death. Sometimes their bodies are compressed causing asphyxiation. Or patients suffocate when they get wedged between the bedrail and the side of the mattress, with their faces pressed against the mattress. These hideous entrapment deaths usually occur with elderly patients. As long ago as 1995, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a Safety Alert to hospitals and nursing homes warning about entrapment hazards and safety concerns that accompany the use of bed rails.

I’m currently handling a case involving the strangulation death of an 87-year-old Massachusetts woman in 2006. The woman slid off her nursing home bed, and caught her chin on the raised bedrail. Her head became wedged between the bed rail, mattress and bed frame, with the rest of her body in a sitting position toward the floor, causing asphyxiation.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health concluded that the woman’s mattress pad alarm and personal safety alarm had not sounded to alert the nursing staff that the woman was in distress. Nonetheless, the woman’s tragic death could have been prevented if the nursing home had taken the proper steps to identify and eliminate the risk of entrapment hazards associated with bedrails.

Compounding these tragedies is the fact that they could have been easily avoided. Long-term care facilities and hospitals can take relatively easy and inexpensive steps to protect patients from these dangers.

For example, they can install cushions to fill the gap between mattress and bedrail, much like bumpers used in a baby crib. As an alternative, they can install see-through netting to fill the gap, which provides patients better visibility from their beds. Another safeguard is to simply use thicker mattresses to eliminate the gap.

Nursing homes and hospitals have used bedrails for decades with the intention of restraining patients from falling out of bed and suffering injuries. However, medical studies actually show that bedrails can increase the likelihood of falls as elderly patients try to crawl over or around them. A safer option is to simply place a patient in a bed low to the floor with safety mats next to the bed, and avoid using bedrails altogether.

Some long-term care facilities and hospitals increase the potential for injuries and death by “mixing and matching” beds, mattresses and bedrails from different manufacturers, causing unsafe integration of bed parts. Not only that, nurses and nursing assistants often receive inadequate training on the proper use of bedrails, and effective monitoring of patients.

A related problem is that the cause of death is often misdiagnosed because the suffocation can result from a gentle compression of the body or covering of the nose and mouth. The trauma often associated with strangulation, such as bruising of the neck or a fractured hyoid bone, which lay at the base of the tongue, is not always present or may not be identified.

An even larger potential problem is that long-term care facilities and hospitals either destroy or alter their medical records (more often than you’d like to believe), which makes it harder to prove their negligence in the use of bedrails and monitoring of patients.

The sad truth remains that bedrails can cause more problems than they solve. There’s often no need to use them, yet they are continuing to be used, and people are dying or suffering serious injuries as a result.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Protecting Consumers from Binding Arbitration Clauses

Ken Margolin — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Big corporations love binding arbitration clauses. They are hidden in many contracts, requiring the individual to give up his or her right to a jury trial in the case of a dispute with the company. Some clauses attempt to block class actions. When large corporations are safe from class actions, they can cheat large numbers of people in small increments, knowing that paying off the few individuals who take the time to pursue justice, will be an acceptable cost of doing business.

Two Democratic congressmen, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA), propose to protect Americans from many binding arbitration clauses. They have introduced the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007. The Act would declare pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses in the context of employment, consumer, franchise, and civil rights disputes, to be invalid and unenforceable. People Over Profits, sponsored by the American Association for Justice, backs the bill. The People Over Profits web site explains the bill, and makes it easy to let your senators and representatives know that you want the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007, enacted into law.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ken Margolin

Fake Studies for Medical Malpractice Defense

Ken Margolin — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:20:00 GMT

Today's Boston Globe carried an article with the title, "Bed sores aren't always a sign of negligent care." Having written blogs on this site, suggesting that severe pressures sores are usually caused by nursing home negligence, I read the Globe piece carefully (the law firm of Stark & Stark, has an excellent blog on the subject). My radar went up when I read the sentence that
"[T[he sentiment [that all serious bed sores are avoidable with proper care] was so strong that numerous nursing homes paid large legal settlements to families of patients who developed the sores...." The implication was that the settlements should not have been paid, and that the cases should have been defended based upon the "new findings" of some researches that "[A]t least some pressure ulcers are unavoidable." Those findings may be true, given the broad scope of "at least some....," but I will not be surprised if the studies commented upon in the Globe article, appear before juries considering nursing home negligent cases involving bed sores. I will be equally unsurprised to see the authors of these studies, retained as testifying experts, by nursing home defendants.

"Don't believe everything you read," has always been good advice. That may be especially true if an article in a prestigious medical journal, reads as if it were designed for insurance lawyers defending medical malpractice defendants - it may have been. Many members of the plaintiffs' bar have long suspected that articles and studies have been crafted to aid defendants in cerebral palsy medical malpractice cases, and cases of erb's palsy due to shoulder dystocia caused by negligent delivery. I encountered the phenomenon personally in a case I handled involving a neurologically impaired infant. When the defense listed their experts, there was the name of a doctor renowned for writing a plethora of articles linking various birth traumas to a significantly reduced life span. He was going to testify that my client would not live long, and that costs of care would be far less than we claimed. When I checked this man out further, it appeared that he had been often exposed as a well-credentialed shill for medmal insurers, and that he rode his articles to a lucrative career in defense testimony (he never testified in my case). The practice of writing articles designed to aid malpractice defendants, rather than to advance science, is cynical and unethical. Plaintiffs' lawyers need to be familiar with the peer-reviewed literature relevant to their case, and to be wary of articles written with medmal defendants in mind.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ken Margolin

Maclaren's "Voluntary" Recall of Strollers May Not Be So Voluntary

Steven Schafer — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:26:50 GMT

On November 9, 2009, Maclaren USA, the American subsidiary of the British manufacturer of umbrella strollers and other children’s products, “voluntarily” recalled about 1 million strollers because of reports of children suffering fingertip lacerations and amputations. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “The stroller’s hinge mechanism poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding [or] opening the stroller.”

This article will focus on the “voluntary” aspect of the recall. Future articles will focus on the manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen, and what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

This recall is about as voluntary as Bernard Madoff’s plea bargain, and Maclaren’s press release about as sincere as Madoff’s confession. The Consumer Product Safety Act requires a manufacturer to report consumer complaints to the CPSC where the manufacturer has notice that one of its products contains a defect that amounts to a substantial product hazard or poses an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death.

The CPSC can order a manufacturer to notify its customers and the public and to recall the product, and it can impose hefty fines if a manufacturer has withheld information, not acted quickly enough in reporting its knowledge to the CPSC, or otherwise placed the public at risk. Faced with an imminent government order, a manufacturer often decides that it’s better to cooperate with the CPSC, “voluntarily” recall a product, and offer a repair kit to consumers, than wait for the CPSC to impose harsher action. By cooperating in a “voluntary” recall, a manufacturer can spin its explanation to avert a public relations disaster and can negotiate fines.

Many consumers expressed dismay that 12 children suffered partial finger amputations before Maclaren did anything to prevent more injuries. What hasn’t yet been answered, however, is when Maclaren first learned of a child with a partial finger amputation, or first learned that a child was almost injured (making an actual injury all the more foreseeable), and how long it took the company to report the product defect to the CPSC. We also don’t know how Maclaren obtains and maintains its information on injuries.

Maclaren’s press release reaffirmed the company’s “unwavering commitment to child safety.” One would think a safety conscious manufacturer would want to provide equal protection to children in other countries, yet until consumer outrage sunk in, Maclaren initially was making the repair kits available only for U.S. consumers. The CPSC’s authority does not extend overseas, so Maclaren’s sense of voluntariness didn’t initially extend to countries that lack the United States regulatory protections, even though the strollers sold elsewhere are identical to those sold here. Maclaren says that it has received fewer reports of such injuries in the UK. Could it be that British tikes are themselves more safety conscious? Or, perhaps their fingers are less valuable than those of American children.

From product liability cases we have handled, this writer knows that it is not unusual for manufacturers to set up elaborate mechanisms to avoid learning or disclosing information about product injuries. When injuries do come to the attention of product manufacturers, many record the information in language that emphasizes consumer error in operating the product, not design defects that should have been identified and eliminated by the manufacturer. Sometimes injuries are assigned innocuous injury classifications to mask what really happened.

In the case of one children’s product made by another company, we found that the manufacturer instructed its customer service representatives who fielded consumer telephone calls not to ask if anyone was injured when a product failed. If a parent or caregiver reported an injury, the person was immediately transferred to another department that recorded basic information, but didn’t ask questions to clarify the severity of injuries or how they happened. The consumer wasn’t told that hundreds of other customers experienced the same problem. Reports were toned down to make the events seem innocuous and emphasis was placed on the parent or caregiver not properly operating the product, not on the inherent defect in the product’s design. Then, reports were not passed on to the regulatory people who were responsible for reporting the injuries to the CPSC. Years went by before the company reported the injuries to the CPSC.

This writer has learned of one little girl who suffered a partial index finger amputation long before Maclaren announced the “voluntary” recall. The child’s mother spoke to a customer service representative at Maclaren, but never received a response from the company. It’s doubtful that her complaint was included in the fifteen reports acknowledged by Maclaren.

So, we are left asking, what did Maclaren know and when did the company know it?

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Elevator Accidents

Ken Margolin — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Elevators are often described as the safest means of travel. I don't know if that is true, though it may well be, given the untold numbers of times elevators go up and down across America on any given day. Nevertheless, elevators are machines and like all machines, they can and do fail. The reality of a free-falling elevator can be as frightening as the nightmare. The occupant is completely helpless and can do nothing until the failed elevator falls.

Sometimes elevator deaths are caused by a combination of elevator failure and occupant panic - the trapped person becoming claustrophobic, trying to exit a stalled elevator and falling through the shaft. A somewhat more common cause of elevator accidents, usually not resulting in fatalities, are doors that close too fast and do not stop when encountering a trapped person or limb. On very rare occasions, elevator doors open, but the elevator has not ascended, a fatal trap if an unwary person steps into the void. An elevator that fell five floors to the lobby of a downtown Boston high rise, resulted in traumatic brain injury to a female passenger. Despite the protests of the elevator manufacturer and maintenance company that the elevator was safe and the accident probably never happened (there was a second occupant of the elevator who said that it did), they settled the case for $1.1 million. On the rare occasion when an elevator does fail and causes death or serious injury, there will inevitably be fault on the part of the manufacturer or the entity responsible for maintenance.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ken Margolin

Anesthesia Error - a Deadly Form of Malpractice

Ken Margolin — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:30:00 GMT

Anesthesia errors, fortunately, are not everyday occurrences. When they do happen, the results are often catastrophic. Since a serious anesthesia mistake often causes deprivation of oxygen to the patient, death or brain damage can be the end result.

To the great credit of the anesthesia profession, it was anesthesiologists who led the way to modern methods of medication error reduction. Borrowing techniques from the airline industry, anesthesia professionals used "root cause analysis" to analyze each step in an anesthesia catastrophe until the cause was understood. Systemic failures were often the root cause - for example, poor communication between surgeon and anesthesiologist, excessive work loads, or training inadequately oriented to preventing errors.

In the 1980s, the American Society of Anesthesiologists devised standards of care, which evolve with advances in learning and technology, and that ultimately were recognized as standards applicable to the entire profession. Monitoring a patient's oxygenation during anesthesia, has vastly improved over the years. The result of the anesthesia profession's introspection and efforts to improve, has been to radically reduce the number of anesthesia tragedies. The methods used by the anesthesia profession have been adopted by medical professionals generally to reduce medication and other medical errors.

No system is error-free. Anesthesia tragedies have occurred in Massachusetts in recent years due to temporary anesthesia staff unfamiliar with a hospital's procedures, administration of the wrong type of anesthesia, failure to empty a stomach of food prior to administering general anesthesia (which can cause the patient to vomit into the lung with often fatal result), to name a few. Whenever a patient dies or suffers brain damage unexpectedly during surgery, a call to a medical malpractice attorney is wise. Anesthesia records are detailed and provide a minute to minute picture of what did or did not occur. If anesthesia malpractice occurred, it can generally be discovered by an expert review of the medical record. In a case of anesthesia malpractice, the patient's rights to recover for the injuries caused are the same as for any other form of medical malpractice.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ken Margolin

Solutions to the Medication Error Crisis

Ken Margolin — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:48:41 GMT

Medication errors injure an estimated 1.5 million Americans each year. That staggering number is reported in studies conducted by the medical profession and pharmaceutical industries themselves. While there is no single cure for this terrible problem, borne ironically, of the tools used to cure disease, the steps to be taken to greatly reduce the problem have been understood for more than 10 years.

Better training of non-physician hospital personnel who mix, deliver, and administer drugs, is crucial. In order to cut costs, hospital pharmacy technicians who may be paid less than a pizza delivery driver, often have the responsibility to follow written directions and make the necessary measurements necessary to mix or dilute medications. Even in the age of computers, poor doctors' handwriting is the source of many errors. Another major cause of errors is the simple misplacement of a decimal point. Computer cross-checking of safe dosage ranges, generally, and for a particular patient, can minimize decimal point errors. Absent computers, the simple expediency of using zeros when necessary for clarity, can help; for example, 0.25 milligrams, rather than .25, which might be carelessly misread as 2.5.
JCAHO, the hospital industry's accreditation organization, has identified the following as leading causes of serious medication errors: Misread Prescription; drug taken from wrong vial; Milligrams (mg) in prescription read by health care worker preparing or administering the medication, as grams (g); improper dilution (or failure to dilute) adult strength drug administered to an infant; prescription misread because of poor handwriting - failure to call physician for clarification; wrong tube (from wall oxygen supply) connected to Import; Oxygen, rather than intended IV solution pumped into patient; zeros inadvertently added to intended prescription strength, for example, 12 mL read as 120 mL.
Some of the solutions being implemented by pharmaceutical, hospital, and medical professionals, to solve the problem are: (1) Improved training and education. Each pharmacist, physician, nurse, and pharmacy technician involved in the medication process - from production in the pharmacy to administration to the patient - is competent to perform the tasks he or she is assigned to perform; (2) Effective use of computers. Computers will be increasingly used to record patients' prescriptions, drug allergies, and other pertinent information, and to alert health care providers when a prescription entered into the system for a given patient, appears inappropriate; (3) Unit dosing. Whenever possible, drugs should be individually packaged for specific patients, rather than prepared from stocks of medications, Primary use of unit dosing has radically lessened medication errors in some hospitals; (4) Improved analysis. Leaders in the field of medication error have realized that the causes of errors must be understood if the numbers of errors are to be significantly reduced. To that end, hospitals are being encouraged to clearly define what constitutes a medication error, to require that all errors be reported on standardized forms, and to analyze the underlying, systemic deficiency that caused or permitted the error to occur; (5) Collaboration with drug manufacturers. Many serious medication errors can be traced to labeling problems, such as labels cluttered with too much information, inadequate or obscured warnings, brand names of drugs for different purposes that sound alike. Representatives of the pharmaceutical industry and medical professions must collaborate on an on-going basis to identify and resolve potential problems before they contribute to a patient death or serious injury; (6) Recognizing medication error as a systems problem. Catastrophic medication errors are almost always due to systemic failures. While nurses and pharmacy technicians often commit specific errors, ultimate responsibility usually lies with the Pharmacy Chief or other hospital administrators who failed to devise adequate systems of error-prevention or who failed to adequately train and educate their personnel. The committment must be to insure that the number of serious medication errors in 2015 is far less than steadily shocking numbers from 1995 through the present.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ken Margolin

Glade Air Fresheners and Fires

Staff Writer — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:20:01 GMT

In April of 2002, SC Johnson announced a recall of 2.5 Million of its GladeÂ® Extra Outlet Scented Oil Air Fresheners, because the products posed a risk of fire. The air fresheners were sold between January 2002 and April 2002. SC Johnson stated in a press release that the "Glade PluginsÂ® products are safe and will not cause fires."

While the press release is undated, as stated in the release

SC Johnson recently learned that there have been postings on the Internet that have claimed that its products were involved in fires.

This would put the release at a time at least around Fall of 2002. It also seems intended to convince users of the safety of using Glade products and to assure them there is no risk of fire.

However, around this same time of the recall and press release, SC Johson was defending a lawsuit brought by the widow of a man who died from a house fire, alleging that a defective Glade product casued the fire. The case is Riely vs. S.C. Johnson & Sons, Inc., and was venued in the New York State. The incident occured in 1998, and the case was heard for summary disposition in August of 2002--right after the recall. I am also aware of several lawsuits claiming house fires from the recalled 2002 air fresheners--in Arizona and Colorado.

While it may be natural for SC Johnson to defend the safety of its products, the company may be understating the risk of fires. As with all products, you should be aware of the most current information related to a product's safety, read the directions and warnings and report problems to the goverment immediately.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Staff Writer

Maclaren Stroller Recall: What A Parent Should Do

Steven Schafer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT

Two earlier articles focused on the supposed “voluntary” aspect of the recall and a manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen. This article speaks to what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Parents and caretakers should be skeptical about the “voluntary” nature of this recall and the accuracy of the numbers cited – Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

Parents and caretakers should also be skeptical of Maclaren’s free repair kit, which appears to consist of cloth hinge covers that snap onto the frame. Covers that easily snap in place can also be easily removed, yet the unsafe pinch points remain. From a design standpoint, a guard or cover that can be easily removed without disabling the product is inadequate. One must be concerned that the next family who inherits the stroller may be unaware of the covers’ importance and may remove them for any number of reasons. Covers may be removed once they get dirty and may not be replaced. (Doesn’t Maclaren realize that peanut butter and jelly and many other substances are inherent to this product’s expected environment of use?)

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller:

And, after careful consideration, you want to continue to use the stroller, then you should request the hinge covers from Maclaren and only use the stroller when the hinge covers are in place;
And you are not wedded to the stroller, then you do not have to settle for the hinge covers. You should write to Maclaren – emails are good; snail mail sent certified, return receipt requested, is better; both methods are best – and request a refund. If they insist on your returning the stroller first, go ahead and do that, but request that they pay the shipping costs. Maclaren can be contacted at www.maclaren.us/recall.

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller, and you have seen your child place a finger in the hinge mechanism:

You should report this to Maclaren and either request the hinge covers or a refund (see above);
You should also report this to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC Recall Hotline is 800-838-2772. The CPSC website is https://www.cpsc.gov/cgibin/incident.aspx.

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller, and your child has suffered a lacerated or amputated finger or other injury from the hinge mechanism:

Do not use the stroller, with or without hinge covers;
Do not throw the stroller away, but store it in a safe, clean place;
You or an attorney should write to Maclaren and report the injury (see above);
You or an attorney should report the injury to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (see above);
You are entitled to reimbursement for your child’s medical bills (past and future) and your son or daughter is entitled to compensation for pain and suffering and disfigurement, including corrective surgery if available and indicated.

No consumer who has been injured by an unsafe product need apologize for exercising his or her legal rights. Despite the protestations of manufacturers and the insurance industry, product liability claims in the United States have led to safer roads, workplaces, schools, and homes. To illustrate, double hand controls on industrial machines prevent an operator’s hands from getting in the way of moving parts. Automobiles are now more crashworthy because of stronger structural components, padded dashboards, airbags, safety glass, seatbelts and crush zones. And children’s toys don't have small parts that can be swallowed or lead paint that can be ingested. Product liability claims pressed by consumers and their attorneys have led to these improvements.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer