Saturday, October 15, 2011

Filing a Medical Negligence Claims


Doctors and nurses are meant to care for your health and make you feel better when you are feeling under the weather. However, sometimes the errors of medical professionals can make your issue worse rather than better. In this situation you have every right to enter in to making a claim against the negligent party. 

What is Medical Negligence? 

Medical negligence occurs when a medical professional acts in way that a 'reasonable body' of medical professionals would not have. This judgement will be made by a board of individuals in the profession. You may have experienced medical negligence if any of the following has happened to you:- 

- You have been given the wrong medication: if you have been given medication you are allergic to or which conflicts with medication you are currently taken you will have reasonable grounds to claim. If a prescribing error has led you to take the wrong dosage of a medicine or the wrong medicine altogether, you will also be able to claim. 

- Failure to diagnose: if your disorder was left undiagnosed and subsequently became a lot more serious or incurable as a result, your claim will be successful if it is ruled that a diagnosis would have been made in a more timely fashion by another doctor. 

- Failure to treat: this could go hand in hand with a failure to diagnose or it could be that an issue was highlighted but treatment was not given rapidly enough. 

- Administration failures: if an administration failure in a hospital led to you or a loved one being treated for the wrong thing, in the wrong department, or not being treated at all, you may be able to make a negligence claim against the hospital. 

- Failure to provide diagnostics: if you end up at the doctors or in the hospital, you expect to leave with answers and on the road to recovery. If the hospital or surgery fails to provide you with the tests necessary to diagnose an issue, you may be able to make a medical negligence claim if you later develop a disorder which could have been easily diagnosed with the symptoms you were presenting and the application of the correct tests. 

These are some broad examples of medical negligence in action but they are by no means a cohesive list.