Four Situations to Hire a Medical Malpractice Lawyer

Even for the best doctors with the finest of diagnostic tests and equipment, there’s an element of educated guesswork that goes into providing healthcare. Sometimes healthcare fails us, and it’s just no one’s fault. But other times, negative health outcomes are due to negligence of some kind. When that happens, you need a medical malpractice lawyer on your side so you can be properly compensated for all you’ve been through.

Four Situations to Hire a Medical Malpractice Lawyer

Failure to Diagnose or a Misdiagnosis

If you are suffering because a doctor dismissed your symptoms, failed to administer the property tests and thus missed a diagnosis, or gave you the wrong diagnosis when due care should have prevented the mistake, then you should definitely hire a lawyer. Be aware that not every misdiagnosis or failed diagnosis should result in a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Sometimes it’s not possible to make a diagnosis earlier, and sometimes different diseases have similar symptoms. The question is always whether a competent doctor, exercising due care and using all the accepted standards of medical diagnosis and treatment in the field, would have caught the issue. A good medical malpractice lawyer in Kansas City will start by helping you decide whether you have a case.

Negligence in Anesthesia

It is the responsibility of the surgeon or doctor and the anesthesiologist to ensure a patient is safely and completely anesthetized before any medical procedure begins. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for patients to be given the wrong amount or type of anesthesia, or for the medical personnel involved to get the timing wrong due to lack of care. In these cases, it’s essential to contact an attorney and understand what steps you should take next.

Surgical Errors

Surgery is supposed to go smoothly, and most do, but even still, thousands of people suffer from surgical errors every year: and that’s only including the “should never happen” events, like removing the wrong organ or limb, leaving a foreign object in the body, or operating on the wrong part of the body. There are even more surgical errors of more minor types.

Perhaps the worst thing about these events is who is responsible for them. You would think that mostly either very new or very old surgeons would make these kinds of mistakes, through inexperience or because it’s time to retire. Yet statistics show it’s actually doctors in the middle of their careers who are most likely to make these errors, and nearly 2/3 of those who are indicted for malpractice of this sort had a previous accusation.

Doctors who show themselves negligent during something as important as surgery need to be stopped before they can harm someone else, and a medical malpractice suit is one way of drawing attention to the issue.  

Lack of Information

Before a doctor or hospital administers treatment, they are responsible to make you aware of all the possible risks involved in what they’re about to do. You should never be given medicine without knowing possible side effects, and you should never undergo a procedure without being informed of what all the possible repercussions will be so that you can give informed consent to treatment.

In some cases, it’s not possible for a patient to be properly informed, as when, for example, someone comes into an emergency room unconscious and in need of emergency life-saving surgery. If no family member can be found in time, the doctors will simply have to make a decision. However, in most cases, either the patient themselves or their family or designated medical power of attorney must be told everything about a treatment before it begins. When that doesn’t happen and the treatment results in injury or unnecessary suffering, it’s time to contact a lawyer.

Standard for Determining Malpractice

Again, just because you’ve experienced a negative health outcome doesn’t automatically mean there was automatically malpractice involved. To win your case, you will need to prove four things:

1. You Were Owed a Duty of Care

This is the simplest aspect of your case. Here, you just need to prove that there was a doctor-patient relationship between you and the person you are accusing of malpractice.

2. The Accepted Standard of Care Was Not Provided

Malpractice is defined this way: “any act or omission by a physician during the treatment of a patient that deviates from accepted norms of practice in the medical community and causes an injury.” You will need to show that you were not treated according to accepted medical practice.

3. You Suffered Damages

You must have actually suffered damages in order to bring a case.

4. Your Damages Are the Direct Result of the Failure to Provide the Accepted Standard of Care

This is the hardest part to prove and the area where you most need your lawyer’s help and experience. It is not enough that you have suffered damage, or even that you were not provided with the accepted standard of care. That failure must be the direct cause of the damage you are suffering.

Medical malpractice is a very complicated area of the law, but getting justice when a doctor’s failures and negligence have caused harm is essential. If you suspect you’ve been the victim of malpractice, contact a lawyer immediately.