Medical malpractice claims must meet specific criteria. You must prove the doctor-patient relationship and negligence resulting in injury. If you’re not able to prove these things, you may not have a case for medical malpractice.
What Isn’t Medical Malpractice
A doctor may treat you ethically, meaning that they meet or exceed their duty to you as a patient. However, you might not get the outcome you expected or that you wanted from a medical procedure. For example, you may have surgery to remove cancer, hoping that your condition will be permanently treated. However, a few months later, you may learn that your cancer has reemerged.
This would not necessarily qualify as medical malpractice. You would have to prove that the doctor caused you harm by behaving unprofessionally and not how another professional would have treated you given the same circumstances.
The law does not require a medical caregiver to be perfect. When evaluating a medical malpractice claim, a medical malpractice lawyer will examine whether the patient’s attending caregiver failed to follow standard practices or was negligent. It’s important to look for a professional that has handled many medical malpractice cases in the past.
What Is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice happens when a healthcare professional causes injury to their patient through an act of omission or negligence. This negligence could be caused by errors in diagnosis, poor aftercare treatment, negligent primary treatment, or poor health management.
For it to be medical malpractice, the act must violate the standard of care. Legally there are specific standards for medical professionals that are viewed as being acceptable and reasonable under particular circumstances. This is referred to as the “standard of care.” All patients should require medical professionals to deliver care in harmony with these standards.
You will need to prove that the negligence caused an injury. It’s not enough for a medical professional to violate standard care. Their violation must lead to a person being injured in a way that would not have happened in the absence of negligence.
Finally, it must be shown that a serious injury resulted in serious damages. Medical malpractice cases can be costly. The patient must show that they suffered sufficient damages from the injury to merit the case for the case to be viable. If not, it may be more expensive to pursue the case than what a patent might actually recover.
Know Your Rights
If you or someone in your family is the victim of medical malpractice, it is good to talk about your case with an attorney. This way, you know that your rights are being protected.