Reading list: Criteria for Establishing Liability in a Medical Malpractice Claim
Medical malpractice might cause personal injuries, additional health complications, even wrongful deaths. The law has provisions for anyone on the receiving end of a medical malpractice to make a legal claim seeking monetary compensation.
However, filing a medical malpractice legal claim comes with a lot of responsibilities, including sourcing for credible evidence to establish liability. Submission of the claim should be within three years, beyond which the law will not recognize such claim.
In this article, we will discuss the criteria of establishing and proving a medical practitioner’s liability in a medical malpractice claim.
Establishing Your Relationship with the Defendant
Your primary responsibility is to establish a relationship with the negligent medical practitioner before the hearing proceeds. As such, your medical malpractice lawyer Michigan will source for evidence associated with the practitioner’s acts of negligence.
The easiest way for your medical malpractice lawyer to establish a medical relationship between you and the practitioner in question is by acquiring the medical reports from the hospital. However, gaining access to such documents will require legal grounds, seeing that the hospital is legally obligated to protect its patients’ medical information.
Your attorney will have subpoena the hospital in order to gain access to your medical reports.
Where your injuries were sustained during surgery, your attorney will use your copy of the consent form signed prior to the procedure to prove that the defendant was your operating surgeon.
Establishing and Proving Malpractice
The defendant is innocent until you, as the plaintiff, prove their fault. As such, your medical malpractice lawyer must build a strong case, leaving no legal loopholes for the plaintiff to circumvent.
You will be responsible for servicing your lawyer with any relevant evidence in order to prove the defendant’s negligence. A misdiagnosis, or a delayed diagnosis that prolonged the effects of your medical condition or further led to the wrong treatment being administered—are all proven by the stamps difference (the time between your arrival at the health facility and the time of the diagnosis).
Additionally, the medication administered based on the misdiagnosis would be major proof of negligence since they would be considered as potential hazard to the already deteriorated health.
The practitioner’s failure to treat you is also a form of medical malpractice, especially if the grounds for lack of treatment is due to racial, religious, or gender discrimination.
Establishing Causation
When your lawyer successfully establishes a medical relationship between you and the defendant (and has successfully proven that he was negligent), what follows is proving that the injuries you sustained are directly caused by the defendant's negligence.
Proving causation is the simplest of the four stages of establishing liability in a medical malpractice claim. Most of the effects of the defendant's ignorance are easily proven with a detailed medical report.
A wrongfully amputated arm, use of unsterilized surgical instruments, and leaving bandages inside your body would cause serious complications. Your malpractice lawyer can associate the organ failure with these defendant’s negligent actions.
Wrongful medication attracts more serious charges for the defendant because the drugs lead to the development of other health conditions, sometimes even more serious than the initial condition.
A blood toxicology report is crucial evidence as it proves that a wrongful death was directly caused by wrongful medication or complications arising from the wrong treatment procedures.
Medical Malpractice Damages
As we established earlier, a medical malpractice claim is aimed at seeking monetary compensation for the medical expenses and injuries sustained as a result of the practitioner's negligence. As such, the bodily damages are the basis for measuring the extent of the losses in a medical malpractice claim. Consequently, the extent of the losses determines the amount of monetary compensation you are going to receive.
Your settlement will be calculated by either referring to the monetary settlement of previous cases of the same nature, or by granting your settlement demands as you have requested.
Conclusion
Medical malpractice has serious adverse effects on the patient, such as additional health complications. A medical malpractice claim ensures that you get compensated for the pain and suffering you have sustained.