If a medical professional harmed you, then you can sue them. That’s medical malpractice, and it happens fairly often. The stats say many doctors face such an allegation during their careers, though they’re not all justified.
About 80% of OBGYNs face a lawsuit at some point, and many other doctors as well. How can you feel confident you have a case, though?
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can know you have a strong case against a medical professional and what legal steps you should take if such an individual harmed you.
You Can File a Complaint with the State Medical Board
To start, you can contact the medical board of the state in which you live. It’s the board’s job to review your complaint to see whether it has any validity.
If a medical review board feels you have a valid complaint against a doctor, they might suspend or take away that doctor’s license permanently. If they get multiple complaints against the same individual, that makes them revoking that doctor’s license much more likely.
However, you won’t collect any money from such an action. You might take personal satisfaction from it, since you can stop that doctor from making another mistake that harms someone else. It’s not like suing someone, though. That’s a different kind of legal action that you might also consider in such a situation.
You Can Consult with a Lawyer
After contacting the state’s medical review board, or instead of doing that, you might reach out to a lawyer who handles civil cases. If a doctor does something out of line that harms you, and if they did something malicious, like sexual assault, for instance, that’s a criminal matter.
You can contact the police as well as a lawyer if you feel a doctor or some other medical professional did something that hurt you intentionally. The police will investigate and see whether what you say happened has any validity. You must have evidence if you hope to get charges to stick, though.
When you speak to a lawyer, you can tell them what occurred. They will likely ask you some probing questions.
You should tell them the truth without omitting any details or embellishing. If you claim something happened that didn’t, or you leave out certain facts, those might come out later during the investigation. That can hurt your chances of winning any possible legal action.
You Can Launch a Civil Case
If the lawyer you speak to feels that you have a case, and they have the time and the inclination, they might agree to handle your lawsuit and start investigating. Doctors and hospitals often have deep pockets. A lawyer might relish the chance of going after such a person or entity if they think you have a good chance of winning your case.
Before you hire a lawyer, make sure you trust them and get along with them reasonably well. You’ll likely spend quite a bit of time with this individual in the immediate future, so you should have a rapport if at all possible. If you don’t, then you need to at least get along with your attorney well enough to tolerate their presence for all the phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings that will take place between the two of you.
Your lawyer should have an investigator on staff or more than one if it’s a larger firm. The investigator will try to uncover any evidence that the incident that harmed you happened like you said.
That might involve finding medical documents that support your version of events. Maybe they can find some witnesses that saw marks on your body. If the doctor performed unnecessary surgery, you can probably show evidence of that without much trouble. If they prescribed the wrong medication or operated on the wrong body part, you can show physical proof that it happened.
The Next Steps
While your lawyer’s investigators work to figure out what happened, your attorney can notify the person or entity you’re suing that you’re bringing legal action against them. They will likely get their own lawyer. If you’re suing a hospital, they probably already have attorneys standing by. Patients sue medical facilities relatively frequently, so they may have gone through this multiple times already.
If your lawyer’s investigator uncovers plenty of material evidence that indicates you are accurate with your accusations, the doctor, nurse, or whoever else it was who harmed you might try to settle. If they offer you an amount they think will satisfy you, they needn’t go through a long, drawn-out legal battle in the courtroom.
They might want to settle because they don’t want any more negative publicity than they’re already getting. They may also want to get past this to continue with their life.
However, they might fight the civil charges you’re bringing against them if they feel they did nothing wrong or if they know they did but don’t think you can prove it. In civil cases involving medical mistakes, there’s something called the standard of care. You will likely hear this term come up during the trial, if not before.
What Does the Standard of Care Mean?
As your lawyer will doubtless explain to you, a doctor or other medical practitioner must always meet the care standard when treating patients. It means you should expect a certain level of care and professionalism as you get the treatment for which you came to that doctor or facility.
If the doctor or hospital did not meet the standard of care, and you can prove that, you should win your civil case if it eventually goes to a jury’s decision. Remember, though, the jury must agree the person or entity you’re suing didn’t care for you as the medical profession says they should.
If you can establish the person or entity you’re suing didn’t meet the standard of care you were expecting, you probably have some money coming.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
