Your Personal Injury Lawyer Answers: What is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice is a special kind of personal injury that requires a special kind of personal injury lawyer. In Milwaukee, and pretty much anywhere else for that matter, proving and winning a medical malpractice personal injury case is challenging to say the least.
Medical malpractice occurs when a physician or healthcare facility has either been negligent in providing the appropriate standard of care or committed an act that resulted in direct harm to a patient, whether willfully or as a result of incompetence. Several things must be true in order to initiate a medical malpractice personal injury claim:
- There must be an established patient-provider relationship wherein the healthcare provider has a legal duty to provide care for the patient.
- The provider acted in negligence, which resulted in some type of damage or harm to the patient.
- Damage must have occurred; no claim can be made otherwise, even if the provider acted in error.
Medical malpractice cases are quite complex. Although most are usually settled well before they reach the point of a trial, they are time consuming. Because the discovery process typically involves the exchange of complex, sometimes highly technical information, there is usually a seemingly unending banter between expert witnesses, physicians, personal injury attorneys, and others.
While most everyone is familiar with blatant examples of medical malpractice, such as leaving an item inside a patient after surgery, most case are not quite so straightforward. Medical malpractice can include misdiagnosis, errors in prescriptions, failing to treat a known problem or treating it improperly, and much more.
The catch is, any of these circumstances can occur and not qualify as malpractice. In the case of misdiagnosis, for example, one would have to prove that the provider should have known the proper diagnosis and failed to give it. Remember, it’s when a provider deviates from the accepted standard of care, and that deviation results in harm, that a malpractice case exists—and only then.
If you think you have a medical malpractice case on your hands, contact the personal injury attorneys at Rozek Law. We’ll help you put your case together and get you the financial compensation to which you are entitled.
