Medical malpractice is a legal cause of action that arises from a medical professional deviating from the standards of his or her profession. Consequently, a patient becomes injury and wants to know what legal recourse is available.
Who Does Medical Malpractice Affect?
A number of different medical professionals could be implicated in a medical malpractice case in Mesa AZ, including: medical practitioners (e.g., physicians and surgeons), nurses (e.g., nurse practitioners and physicians assistants), and allied health professionals.
Allied health professionals actually experience their fair share of medical malpractice claims because of the kinds of work and adjustments they perform. Allied health professionals work in the following fields: chiropractic, psychologists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, social workers, and radiologists.
No matter whether your medical malpractice case involves a medical practitioner or one of these allied health professionals, the commonality binding all medical malpractice cases together is a failure to bring a reasonable, competent degree of care to the medical procedure.
Informed Consent
Issues of informed consent can also play a role in medical malpractice cases. Sometimes patients are kept in the dark about all of the risks about a medical procedure. A patient must understand and agree to all of the risks before undergoing a medical procedure, even if that medical procedure doesn’t turn out optimally.
Prescription Errors
Both physicians and allied health professionals like pharmacists can ultimately be found guilty of prescription errors, or a case in which a patient is given the wrong dosage or the wrong amount of a particular medication. Other times medications are contraindicated, and the patient subsequently suffers grave harm.
Patients, in short, can be given medications that have side effects. Sometimes those side effects prove extremely debilitating or even fatal. In both of these cases, patients and their families could collection millions in compensation if their case is litigated by a competent personal injury attorney.
Surgical Errors
Surgical errors can implicate medical practitioners like surgeons or allied health professionals like anesthesiologists. A common cause of medical error in anesthesiology involves an anesthesiologist who isn’t as attentive as he or she should be to the patient’s entire medical history. Giving the wrong amount or type of anesthetic can prove calamitous.
Misdiagnosis
Over 12 million people in the United States are misdiagnosed in an outpatient medical setting, and millions more fail to be diagnosed at all. Contact a personal injury attorney if you’ve suffered due to the above medical malpractices.