It's been several months since Dennis Quaid's newborn twins almost died in a Los Angeles hospital after accidentally being given an overdose of a blood thinner, and the actor is speaking out again on the matter aiming to draw attention on medical errors that kill as many as 100,000 Americans a year.

Quaid and his wife Kimberly, talked to "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Croft about a parent's worst nightmare for the first time in a television interview, scheduled to air this Sunday, March 16, at 7 PM.

"Our kids are bleeding from everyplace that they've punctured …They were working on (our son) Boone, whose belly button would not stop bleeding…blood squirted across the room…. It was blood everywhere," Quaid recalled. "It was a life-and-death situation."

The twins, Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace, born via a gestational carrier on November 8, almost lost their lives on November 20, after medical staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A, accidentally gave them an overdose of Heparin on November 18, confused by the blood thinner's packaging.  

Heparin is a common injectable anticoagulant derived from mucosal tissues of slaughtered meat animals such as porcine intestine or bovine lung. Just 1 unit of Heparin is required to keep 1 mL of cat blood fluid for 24 hours at 0°C, and the twins, along with another newborn patient, received 10,000 units. The normal dosage for a newborn is just 10 units.

"It basically turned their blood to the consistency of water, where it had a complete inability to clot. They were basically bleeding out at that point," Quaid said.

"These mistakes that happened to us are not unique ... they 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 medical mistakes" the 53-year-old actor explained.

"It's bigger than AIDS. It's bigger than breast cancer. It's bigger than automobile accidents and yet, no one seems to really be aware of the problem," the "Vintage Point" star pointed out.

"We all have this inherent thing that we trust doctors and nurses that they know what they're doing. But this mistake occurred right under our noses, that the nurse didn't bother to look at the dosage on the bottle. It was avoidable, completely avoidable," he added.

While the babies recovered well following the tragic happening, Quaid and his wife decided to sue the pharmaceutical company Baxter Healthcare Corp., the Illinois-based makers of Heparin, accusing the firm of negligence in using very similar packages for different doses of the drug, thus creating a dangerous situation.

A parallel incident in Indiana resulted in three infant fatalities and for 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, noting that toasters and trucks are routinely recalled. "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."

An investigation conducted by California authorities concluded that the hospital's unsafe medication practices "created a risk of harm for all hospital patients."

The investigation found that nurses and pharmacy technicians did not check labels on the vials of Heparin before using them and did not keep adequate records of when the medication was used. The hospital was found to not have adequately educated its staff about the safe use of Heparin.