Category: Medical Malpractice

Those who stay at a hospital or a similar facility for medical care expect that staff members will provide them with proper support. Unfortunately, neglect in modern hospitals, rehabilitation facilities and nursing homes is a significant issue.

Chronic understaffing at many facilities leaves employees spread thin and unable to provide an appropriate standard of care for every patient. Sometimes all of the patients suffer, or sometimes a few receive worse support than others.

Whether you or the one staying in the hospital or you have a loved one who requires professional medical support, being able to identify the warning signs of neglect in a medical facility could help you advocate for yourself or someone you love in a vulnerable position.

Unanswered call lights

If you visit a family member, and you notice that the call light outside of their room and several others are illuminated, get no staff members are anywhere to be seen, that is a warning that there aren’t enough people around to meet the needs of the residents in a timely fashion.

Similarly, if you go to a nurse’s station to ask for help or get information and cannot find or contact anyone, that could be a relatively benign warning sign of an understaffed facility where patients may experience neglect.

Confused or uninformed staff

If a doctor has recently talked about changing your loved one’s medication, but nurses continue administering treatments that were ineffective or caused bad reactions, a patient could easily suffer.

Proper communication is important in a medical facility, as is every staff member’s careful attention to detail. When workers don’t communicate with one another or have the time to properly check patient records, they can make major mistakes related to the care they provide.

Infections and infestations

In a location where there are numerous people in a small space, the possibility for disease and pests to spread quickly is present. Hospitals and medical facilities should prioritize cleanliness so that lice from one patient don’t end up bothering another.

Additionally, staff members need to be careful about changing their personal protective gear in between patients and maintaining clean utensils so that infections don’t pass from patient to patient. If your loved one develops an infection or suffers an infestation in the hospital, medical neglect may be partially to blame.

Pursuing an insurance claim or civil lawsuit can compensate those who experience medical neglect or other common forms of medical malpractice.

When someone goes to the hospital for treatment, the last thing they expect is that they will suffer from medical malpractice. As rare as you may suspect these injuries are, medical malpractice is actually the third leading cause of death in the country. Suffering an injury at the hospital does not always mean it was the result of a doctor’s negligence, however. For an injury to qualify as medical negligence, there need to be four legal elements present:

A doctor’s duty

The first element of a negligence claim is the establishment of the doctor’s duty to the patient. Every medical provider owes a specific level of care to their patients, but not in every situation. For example, while medical professionals owe a level of duty to the people who come to their hospital, they may not owe any duty to someone who is at the same restaurant as them.

Violating the standard of care

When a doctor provides care for their patients, they need to provide a certain level of care in their service. This quality of care refers to the level of care that a competent medical professional would offer a patient. It may qualify as negligence if a doctor deviates by misdiagnosing a patient, advising dangerous treatments, or prescribing dangerous medications or amounts of them.

Damages

In any kind of personal injury claim, there needs to be some form of damage. Oftentimes, these types of cases see considerable personal injuries with long-lasting or lifelong consequences, including injuries like nerve damage, loss of motor skills, and traumatic brain damage.

Direct cause of damage

The defenses in these cases may try to argue that the damages are not the result of the defendant’s actions, which is where this legal element comes in. The victim and their attorney must be able to prove that the actions the doctor or other medical staff member took when deviating from the standard of care directly caused the damages the victim sustained.

You can hold negligent doctors accountable

Anyone has the potential to make serious mistakes in their job, but for medical professionals, their mistakes can lead to catastrophic consequences. If you believe your hospital accident has these four elements to it, consult with an attorney to discuss how they can help you seek justice after your incident.

Overlapping surgery or double-booked surgery has been a controversial practice that some U.S. hospitals have subscribed to for years. Teaching hospitals have been the most common to allow it. But it often brings into question matters related to ethics and safety, especially since the people most affected – patients undergoing surgery – may not even be aware that this practice occurs

As it may turn out, the surgeon scheduled to perform your surgery may spend little time in the operating room, leaving some of the work performed by a resident or fellow. Such a practice may lead to unnecessary complications that could prove fatal.

Safety risks related to anesthesia

The troublesome practice of overlapping surgery occurs when a doctor operates on two patients in different surgery rooms, switching from room to room during the same period. Hospitals decide whether to allow this practice, which is suspected to be most common in cardiac surgery, neurosurgery and orthopedics.

Critics, including some surgeons and safety advocates, have derided the double-booking practice, claiming it adds needless risk leading to surgical complications. Proponents claim the practice is safe, while providing necessary training for qualified junior doctors, improves efficiency, provides better use of a surgeon’s time and allows more patients to receive care.

However, things can go terribly wrong when a resident or fellow performs an unsupervised surgery. For example, the accidental cutting of arteries and nerves may occur. Another major concern includes patients having to wait under anesthesia for lengthy periods, while residents and fellows perform the unsupervised surgeries because the senior surgeon cannot be found.

Many patients unaware it occurs

Overlapping surgery provides the patient and their loved ones with the illusion that the senior surgeon performed the entire operation. Its practice may come as a surprise to some patients who may not even learn that it happens until something goes wrong.

An online survey conducted in 2017 by Harvard researchers disclosed that many people were not in favor of overlapping surgery. Of the 1,454 respondents, just 31% supported the practice. Also, 95% said patients should know in advance whether this practice occurs. Finally, only 4% even knew about overlapping surgery.

Ask questions and advocate for yourself

Patients must advocate for themselves, inquiring whether the doctor will remain present in the operating room during the entire length of the surgery. If the physician is evasive or non-committal, ask for another surgeon. Pin them down and get exact details. This is your life, and you know that you must protect it.

A medical malpractice lawsuit is often about a victim and their family getting adequate compensation for the pain, suffering, disability, lost wages and other damages they experienced. But while financial restitution is very important, it is not the only thing many plaintiffs are looking for. They may also want the doctor or other medical professional who harmed them to look them in the eye and say, “I’m sorry.”

Traditionally, the nature of a malpractice lawsuit discouraged negligent hospitals and doctors from apologizing to their victims. Admitting that you regretted how you treated a patient could have been used as evidence against you. To be safe, defendants rarely said anything to plaintiffs except through their attorneys.

To encourage honest apologies from physicians, many states, not including Rhode Island, passed so-called “apology laws.” These statutes protect statements of regret from being used as evidence in court.

Among other things, legislators believed that apology laws would lead to fewer medical malpractice lawsuits. Hearing an apology would satisfy many plaintiffs and lead them to drop their suits, lawmakers argued. So far, 38 states have enacted an apology law. Have they had their intended effect? A new study in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online suggests that they have not.

Regrets, but not true apologies

The study notes that though most states have some form of apology protection, only a handful have a “full apology” statute: one that protects statements of regret and disclosure of error. It’s one thing for your doctor to tell you they are sorry you were harmed. It’s another for the doctor to actually take responsibility for their actions and explain to you precisely what happened.

As the study notes, an inadequate apology often feels worse than no apology at all. Imagine you were the victim of medical malpractice, and your doctor says, “I’m sorry for what happened to you.” Would that make you feel better? Or would it sound like somebody who is not being fully honest or sincere with you?

Putting a stop to malpractice in Providence

Part of pursuing a medical malpractice suit is holding the responsible parties accountable. Besides getting compensation for your injuries, you can help stop the negligence from happening to other patients. That can feel like justice has been served, whether or not the defendant admits liability.

Medical professionals have their work cut out for them when it comes to detecting and diagnosing disease. Even with the help of modern medical technology, it’s sometimes next to impossible to recognize the signs of certain conditions. However, when patients tell doctors that they’re in pain or discomfort, that can be a helpful tool to assist the doctor in getting to the root of the problem. Thus, does it count as medical malpractice for a doctor to ignore or dismiss a woman’s descriptions of her pain?

The problem with reports of female pain

There are some indications that suggest that, on average, doctors tend to receive reports of female pain differently than they do of male pain. Sometimes, this can result in conditions worsening when they would have been less severe if addressed earlier.

For example, when women report abdominal pain in an emergency room, on average they wait around 16 minutes longer than men for treatment. This suggests that the emergency room personnel tend to assume that the situation is less severe, or that the reports of pain are exaggerated.

The standard for medical malpractice

Medical malpractice is more severe than a doctor simply making a mistake. If you were to bring a lawsuit against a doctor simply because you didn’t like their methods or thought that they made a minor mistake, you likely wouldn’t succeed. True medical malpractice involves a gross deviation from the professional standard to which our society holds doctors.

For example, if a doctor dismisses a woman’s pain – and her condition worsens untreated as a result – and the woman decides to bring a malpractice suit, her attorney would have to prove several factors.

First, they would have to prove that the doctor owed a duty to the client to follow the standard of care that every doctor must give to their clients. Next, they would have to prove that the doctor grossly deviated from that standard by doing something that the average competent doctor would never do. Lastly, they would have to show that the woman suffered an injury, and that the injury was the direct result of the doctor’s deviation from the standard.

Despite the fact that a medical professional has a very challenging job, there are certain standards that they must comply with when caring for patients. Dismissing a woman’s pain too early might give rise to valid justification for a medical malpractice lawsuit.