When you use the services of a medical facility or a doctor, you are placing your trust in their hands. Being sick, undergoing surgery and being hospitalized can make almost anyone feel vulnerable and frightened, but in the vast majority of cases you end up grateful for the excellent care you received. There are some sad instances, however, of leaving the hospital worse off than when you entered it. Read on to learn more about a particular kind of personal injury, medical malpractice.
Who is at fault?
Most everyone knows that doctors pay high premiums for medical malpractice insurance coverage. While this might seem to unfairly penalize those who never get sued, it also can protect those who do make a mistake from the potential for financial ruin. When you are talking about medical care, however, the possibility of problems don't stop with a doctor. Consider what happens when you or a loved one gets hospitalized. You may have had to give up counting and naming the number of medical professionals that were associated with that hospitalization.
Medical Facilities
The facilities themselves are responsible for ensuring that your care heals you instead of causing you more harm. When it is not a particular practitioner but a facility itself you are still just as entitled to be paid money damages for the harm done. Often, nurses, medical assistants, physical therapists, phlebotomists and others that work directly for the facility fall into the facility's malpractice coverage umbrella. If you were harmed as a result of an employee of the hospital, for example, the target of your lawsuit is the hospital. If the practitioner has their own practice outside of the hospital then they would be the named defendant in a medical malpractice suit. The facility in question might be any of the following and more:
The Doctor
Doctors have a sworn responsibility to "do no harm" but being human, they can make mistakes. Mistakes made during a surgery get lots of publicity, but there is another way that doctors may be liable. If you present to a doctor and the doctor fails to properly diagnose you, that makes them just as vulnerable to a lawsuit as if they had removed the wrong organ or left an instrument in your body during surgery.
Make no mistake about it, medical malpractice is a particular area of personal injury law and you must find an attorney who knows the issue thoroughly. See medical malpractice lawyers for more information if you or a loved one has been hurt instead of being healed.
Share12 September 2018
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