Medical Injury

There are four elements of medical practice which includes duty, breach, injury and damages. Let us now look at the elements in depth:

• Duty

As soon as a doctor and patient establish a confidential relationship, the doctor has a responsibility to provide the most effective treatment plan possible. This is the element of duty. In medical negligence cases, doctors often overlook more effective approaches to healing or reject newer methods of treatments.

• Breach

When every doctor graduates from medical school, they promise to practice the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath states that doctors will fulfil their duty to provide the best treatment possible to their patients. When a doctor fails to fulfil their duty, they breach their contract. This is the medical negligence element of breach. In order for a doctor to breach their contract, they must fail to perform their duty.

• Injury

Injury is the third element needed in a medical malpractice case to make it viable in court. Injury, or causation, refers to the actual harm caused to a patient by a doctor. In order for injury to occur in the realm of medical malpractice, it must fall under two components: actual cause and proximate cause. In other words, the harm must be a direct result of a doctor who has failed in their duty to provide medical care and therefore breached their contract and the injury must be a result of that failure.

• Damages

Damages are monetary compensation for the harm caused by a doctor’s negligence. In order for a medical malpractice case to stand up in court, the injury or harm caused must be able to be remedied by money. For example, someone who has missed work can be monetarily compensated in court for that time missed.

Medical malpractice is understood to be any act or omission by a physician during treatment of a patient that deviates from accepted norms of practice in the medical community and causes an injury to the patient. Medical malpractice is a specific subset of tort law that deals with professional negligence.

If a tenant has a mental or physical disability which qualifies as medical injury or he is sixty or older, and that tenant has a physical or mental disability that requires the tenant to relocate because of a need for care or treatment that cannot be provided in the rental unit, the tenant can terminate the lease.

Medical negligence happens when a doctor causes harm to a patient unknowingly, either through simple ignorance or failing to take action where it is needed. Medication is a common area in which negligence occurs. A doctor could, for example, prescribe a medication without taking notice of a harmful drug interaction, which could lead to anything from mild discomfort to life-threatening effects in the patient.

On the other hand, medical malpractice occurs in many of the same settings. But unlike negligence, in the case of malpractice, the medical professional is aware of the potential consequences of their actions (or non-actions) and proceeds anyway.

You will have to prove the following things in order to give rise for a medical injury/malpractice suit:

• A valid doctor-patient relationship existed: You must be able to show that there existed a physician/doctor-patient relationship and you’re suing the doctor. This comes to a conclusion that you hired a doctor and the doctor agreed to provide services to you. For example, you can’t sue a physician for overhearing him giving advice to somebody else. 
• Doctor was negligent: If you’re unhappy with your treatment or given results, it doesn’t mean that the doctor is liable for medical injury or malpractice. The doctor must have performed some treatment which resulted in negligence on his part. 
• In order to prove negligence, you must prove that the doctor caused you harm in the way a competent doctor would never have. The doctor’s care is not required to be the best possible, but simply “reasonably skilful and careful”. 
• Doctor’s negligence caused the injury: Because many malpractice cases involve patients that were already sick or injured, there is often a question of whether what the doctor did, negligent or not, actually caused the harm. For example, if a patient dies after treatment for lung cancer, and the doctor did do something negligent, it could be hard to prove that the doctor’s negligence caused the death rather than the cancer. 

If you have been injured because of medical injury or medical negligence, then you can usually pursue compensation from the at-fault party. After establishing that the defendant is, in fact, at-fault, you will then need to prove your financial losses so that you can rightfully claim the money you need to rebuild your life. The money for these losses is known as damages. 

Damages include easily calculable items like medical bills, and non-economic claims like pain and suffering. However, understanding how much money one can claim for pain and suffering is a bit more difficult since there are no receipts or bills. A medical injury lawyer can help you understand how this works.

Here are some examples of medical negligence that might lead to a lawsuit: 

• Failure to diagnose or misdiagnosis. 
• Misreading or ignoring laboratory results. 
• Unnecessary surgery
• Premature discharge.
• Surgical errors or wrong site surgery.
• Improper medication or dosage.
• Poor follow-up or aftercare.
• Disregarding appropriate patient history.

On the basis of various research findings, the researchers estimated that about 3000 Americans died each year due to the reason of postoperative sepsis. The next most serious medical injury was postoperative reopening of a surgical incision, resulting in an average increase in hospital stay of 9.4 days, $40 323 in added charges, and a 9.6% increase in the risk of death. Infection due to medical care was associated with 9.58 extra days of hospital stay, $8656 in excess hospital charges, and 4.31% attributable mortality.

A recent Johns Hopkins study claims more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical injury or errors. Other reports claim the numbers to be as high as 440,000. Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.