Navigating the Complexities of Medical Malpractice Cases
Amongst personal injury claims, medical malpractice cases are among the most complex. Attorneys who take medical malpractice cases must have an in-depth understanding of medical language and terminology, as well as the standard of care within the relevant specialty. These cases are extremely complicated, and it’s crucial to understand the process and the potential delays you’ll experience as you navigate your claim.
Has a medical error left you seriously injured? Let the team at Reeves & Mestayer help. Call us at 228-300-2754 to set up a free consultation right away.
The Viability of Medical Malpractice Claims
Before your attorney gets too far into your medical malpractice claim, they’ll start by looking into the viability of your claim. Not all medical errors or poor outcomes are medical malpractice, and in fact, the majority are not. Medical care providers are prone to the same human mistakes that the rest of us make, and it’s fairly rare for those mistakes to rise to the level of malpractice.
Beyond just determining whether or not you have a valid claim, your attorney will also help you figure out your chances of securing compensation. Consider, for example, a provider who made a surgical error that left you permanently injured. What they did may be considered medical malpractice, but upon further digging, your attorney finds out that they let their malpractice insurance lapse and they are working out of an unlicensed facility without any insurance of its own. While a claim may be successful in court, it would still leave you with empty pockets.
Determining if Medical Malpractice Occurred
A big part of any medical malpractice claim is verifying that malpractice happened. You’ll see these discussions on community forums and social media any time someone posts about a medical error—people tell them to talk to a lawyer and sue the doctor for everything they have. But in many cases, malpractice didn’t occur; the patient was just unlucky enough to have a bad outcome. Medical care is a practice, and it’s impossible to account for all factors. If a doctor took all of the available information and made a decision that’s consistent with the standard of care in their specialty, it’s unlikely that malpractice occurred.
For malpractice to have occurred, your attorney must be able to prove that the provider’s actions were well outside of their specialty’s standard of care. For example, consider an OB/GYN. A patient in labor’s monitoring shows decelerations that indicate the baby is in distress.
The mother has been in labor for well over a day and the baby is not descending. The mother is also so exhausted from the labor that it’s unlikely she’d be able to push. At that point, the standard of care is to perform a C-section. If the doctor ignores these signs, encourages the mother to continue laboring, and ends up delivering their now-stillborn child through a fourth-degree tear, they have gone so far outside of their standard of care that malpractice likely occurred.
Proving Damages
This is important in all personal injury claims, but it comes up a lot in medical malpractice consultations. It is not just enough that medical malpractice occurred—the patient must have measurable damages to sue the doctor. In the OB/GYN example above, they obviously have measurable damages; they lost their child and have serious physical injuries. But if the same situation played out and the baby was eventually born safely with no injury to the mother, the mother would likely not have a successful claim due to her lack of damages. When this is the case, the patient’s course of action should involve calling the Board of Medicine in their home state and seeking justice against their negligent provider that way. If there are no measurable damages, there is no compensation to be awarded.
If You’ve Been Harmed by a Medical Care Provider, Call Reeves & Mestayer Today
At Reeves & Mestayer, we understand how devastating a medical error can be. If you’ve suffered losses because of a careless physician, let us help. Get in touch with our team online or give us a call at 228-300-2754 to set up a consultation with our Biloxi medical malpractice team.
