Majority of times, when a person goes to consult a doctor, undergoes an operation or is given some other treatment or care, the quality of medical care provided is up to the accepted standards. Regrettably, medical errors might happen sometimes resulting in minor or major injuries to patients who then become entitled to receive legal compensations. In order to claim medical negligence compensation, the claimant must show the evidences about what actually happened, how he/she suffered due to it, and who is to blame for it.
Medical negligence refers to the mistakes and negligence on part of a healthcare practitioner wherein he provided some substandard treatment resulting in some harm, injury or undue death to the patient. Mostly, medical negligence or malpractice generally involves the errors during diagnosis, prescription, surgery, aftercare or other treatments. The errors might be because of omitting required action or some negligent practice.
Medical negligence or clinical negligence can occur in various circumstances including:
- When there are some complications in delivery causing birth injuries to newborns or harms to the mother
- When a disease is misdiagnosed by a doctor, let say cancer misdiagnosis that results in devastating consequences for the patient
- When surgeons commits some mistake during operation
- When a wrong drug or dosage is prescribed
Medical negligence law protects the rights of patients and gives them a way to claim compensation against all substandard medical practices that cause them harms. The medical negligence regulations and standards varies in different countries, even a country may have different malpractice laws in place.
The hospitals and healthcare practitioners are not liable to pay for all the damages caused to a patient. They are accountable only for those damages and injuries that were caused by their negligence.
MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE DANGERS
Medical negligence is only said to be occurred when a medical practitioner in charge of patient’s well-being and healthcare commits errors while diagnosis, perform treatment without patient’s consent, or endangers patient’s physical, emotional, mental or financial safety in some way, hence violating patient’s rights. The negligence could be highly devastating with long term physical, financial or emotional effects. Sadly, medical negligence happens more commonly than it is supposed to be. In some instances, victimized patients do not even live for telling what happened to them – their families are left behind struggling for their legal and financial rights afterwards.
More than 98,000 patients die from medical negligence each year. Undue surgery is one of the biggest reasons behind these wrongful deaths. As estimated in New York Times, about 5,000 of these wrongful deaths per year are very much to be avoided if doctors could only consider conservative symptoms for undertaking prostate operation. Often, the hospital or individual practitioners try to achieve out-of-court settlement for medical negligence incidents.
It is very rare that victims get any financial benefit through out-of-court settlements against medical negligence incidents as they can get through legal claims. The reason is negligence cases could be difficult to establish in the court as they require candid evidences to prove that negligence is the cause of alleged damage. The claimant must be able to prove his claim true in order to receive his rightful compensations. He must show how the practitioner in question caused his injury or damage. In some instances doctors have been blatantly negligent in making medical decisions such as performing surgery on a wrong side or organ of the patient; even sometimes a patient is operated entirely needlessly. Apart from such highly damaging negligence cases, majority of malpractice incidents lead to only minor risks such as in prescription errors, or a minor disease left undiagnosed etc. So, in situations where consequences are not that much serious, it becomes even more difficult for victims to come with irrefutable proofs of negligence.