If you feel as though your doctor or nurse treated you improperly, you may be thinking about bringing a claim for medical malpractice. Generally speaking, in order to receive compensation for medical malpractice, you need to prove three things. First, you need to prove that a doctor or nurse’s treatment of you fell below what’s called a standard of care. Second, you need to prove that you’ve suffered an injury. And third, you need to prove the link between the injury and the breach of the standard of care. You need to prove all three of these things.
Proving only one or two of them won’t get you across the finish line. For example, even if your doctor was entirely negligent but you were fortunate enough not to have been injured, you don’t have a medical malpractice claim. It’s important to appreciate that doctors aren’t held to a standard of perfection. They’re held to a standard of what’s called reasonableness. In other words, what would a reasonable doctor in his or her position have done for you? Doctors make judgment calls all day long. Some of the judgment calls, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be wrong and may have caused harm to a patient. In order to have a successful medical malpractice claim, you have to show that no reasonable doctor would have made that particular judgment call.
The only way you can prove negligence in the context of a medical malpractice claim is through opinion evidence of a qualified expert. That expert has to have the same qualifications of the doctor at the center of your claim. For example, you need a gynecologist to give an opinion on the standard of care of another gynecologist, a family doctor for family doctor, etc., etc. Experienced medical malpractice lawyers like myself regularly work with independent doctors to get these necessary opinions. You’ll also need well-qualified doctors to give opinions on the issue of causation, which is a medical question. In other words, you’ll need this medical expert to give the opinion that had treatments been done differently, had it been done within the standard of care, that the result would have been better, or that but for the negligence, you would not have suffered your injury.
If you think you’ve been injured through medical malpractice or you have questions, just give us a call, and we will be happy to chat with you free of charge.
