When you suffer an injury at the hands of your doctor or nurses, you’re in a position where you may be able to seek medical malpractice compensation. Medical professionals are required to go through years of training, and many will cause few, if any, errors in their lifetimes. However, some are not as careful as others or make mistakes that are more likely to hurt their patients, and that can mean that patients will suffer injuries or even die because of mistakes that were made.
When a medical professional isn’t careful and misses a diagnosis or causes injuries in other ways, you’re in a position to file a medical malpractice case for yourself or a family member (in the case of death). Negligence can include many kinds of medical malpractice, from missing a diagnosis, giving the wrong treatment or mismanaging an illness to causing injuries to a patient by operating on the wrong body part or even on the wrong patient.
In a medical malpractice case, a few people can be held accountable. The first is your doctor. If your doctor deviated from the usual standard of care, then that could be a reason to file a lawsuit.
The hospital where you were treated, or the clinic, can also be claimed against if it provided inadequate training to its staff or didn’t provide good sanitation services. Finally, you may be able to claim against state, federal or local agencies that are in charge of monitoring these facilities, since they should be holding them to a high standard of care.
Source: FindLaw, “Medical Malpractice In-Depth,” accessed April 22, 2016