Medical negligence claims are simply about who should bear the financial burden of a health care provider’s mistake — you or the medical malpractice insurance company. All too often victims of debilitating medical mistakes feel pressured to forgive and forget because no one likes the idea of contacting an “ambulance chaser” or being “sue crazy”. This is unfortunate, because the pain and frustration these folks are suffering isn’t their fault. They need professional legal help from a medical negligence attorney to start putting their lives back together.
If you or a loved one have suffered harm because of a medical mistake, you are probably wondering whether you have any medical negligence claims. Here is a brief overview of medical negligence (also known as medical malpractice) to help you as you consider contacting an attorney.
Medical negligence claims arise when a health care provider makes a mistake related to the medical care of you or a loved one and that mistake results in some kind of harm.
Let us look at each aspect of the definition a bit more closely:
1. The situation involves a health care provider. Physicians come to mind first, but there are other types of health care providers that can (and do) occasionally make mistakes that qualify as medical malpractice. Nurses, chiropractors, dentists, podiatrists, even hospitals or physicians groups as legal entities all count.
If you are talking about your hair stylist or the counter clerk at the herbal store, however, it is more difficult to show medical negligence unless there is some type of special training or licensing requirement that permits them to provide the kind of health care that went wrong. A good example of this is massage therapy. In many states, there is a strict schooling and licensing regimen that may involve, say, the massage therapist’s ability to spot worrisome moles on their clients’ backs and suggest follow up with physician. The failure to do this would in some states be medical negligence.
2. The health care provider makes a mistake. This is the “negligence” part. That is, the health care provider fails to do something that he or she has a duty to do as your health care provider. The scope of the duty to perform your health services properly is called the “standard of care”. To determine the standard of care, a court asks “what do competent health care providers typically do in cases such as yours?” If for example, a competent health care provider would have found a particular cancer by a certain stage, and yours does not, it is negligence.
3. The mistake is harmful. That is, the mistake causes “damages,” or harm capable of being assigned a monetary value. Often the harm caused by the mistake is obvious. A surgeon, say, amputates the wrong limb, or a physician fails to find a cancer at a stage prior to it spreading. Sometimes, though, the mistake may not be harmful, such as when an illness is misdiagnosed but quickly clears up on its own.
There are countless variations of these elements. Your medical negligence attorney will conduct a thorough interview with you at the outset to determine how you should proceed.
