The medical field plays an important role in our daily lives. There’s likely been a time in your life when you spoke with a medical professional to help get you better. We seek out medical treatment in places such as a medical office, an emergency room, a hospital, or a medical clinic.
The majority of the time, medical professionals are able to do their job the way that they were trained. However, sometimes medical mistakes happen as a result of a lack of care, negligence, or perhaps even malicious intent.
When a practitioner of medicine fails to provide a universal standard of care that they are supposed to deliver, it could be the catalyst for a lawsuit. Errors in judgment, intent, or application that lead to injury or even death have spurred many individuals to go to court and sue for medical malpractice.
Some mistakes in the medical field are rare, while others are more common than you would think (or hope). While not all errors are automatically able to be classified as malpractice, and the same goes for a death or an injury, malpractice has to be linked to negligence in some way.
It’s important to remember that a bad medical experience or result does not always mean that malpractice or negligence has occurred. However, often times negligence can result in malpractice and that is when bad things can happen– and patients pay the price.
Incompetent action could be classified as negligence, including a misdiagnosis or a delay in correct diagnosis that prevents a patient from getting the treatment for a specific condition that they would need in order to prevent further injury or even death.
Malpractice can not only affect adults, but even infants and fetuses too. Fetal injury can cause a number of conditions and when they are not natural but directly caused by a medical professional messing up or being negligent, that is when a lawsuit may be necessary to pursue the appropriate damages.
Medication is another area where mistakes are frequently committed by professionals. Americans alone are affected by errors in medication in up to a million cases per year. This could be mistakes in drug production and dosing, bad handwriting resulting in mistakes, prescription errors, a mistake in the dosage prescribed or administered, and more. Many of these errors end up going to court in malpractice lawsuits.
Still another area where mistakes can be made that cause injury, complications, or death is the field of anesthesia. Small mistakes here through negligence can have huge negative impacts. Failing to review a patient’s medical history, administrative negligence, a lack of information or instruction on risks, providing a patient with an excess of anesthetic, failing to monitor vital signs, and utilizing equipment that is defective can all be negligence that prompts a lawsuit.
Errors in surgical procedures can also cause lawsuits alleging negligence to occur. Cases have also been filed after the surgery, alleging that the appropriate post-operative care was not provided to the patient, resulting in complications or death.
Have you been through a medical experience that you believe could be classified as malpractice? Speak to a lawyer experienced in this field to receive qualified legal advice on your medical situation and moving forward.
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