Medical errors are more common than you might think, and many instances of medical neglect are never identified. It’s easy to assume that your condition worsened on its own, and it’s hard to know if your doctor made a mistake.
After all, your physician is the expert, and you expect them to do their job correctly.
If you or a loved one suffered a severe complication after an illness or injury, you may question how or why it happened. Furthermore, when you ask your doctor why, they may shrug and say that complications happen or the cause isn’t known.
That could be true, but it’s also possible a healthcare provider made a mistake that led to your worsened condition.
When Should You Contact a Gwinnett County Medical Malpractice Attorney?
Any time that you suspect you may have been a victim of medical malpractice, we recommend you contact a medical malpractice lawyer for a free, confidential consultation. We can help you determine if there is evidence of medical malpractice, and if so, we’ll explain your options for pursuing compensation.
What Is Considered Medical Malpractice in Georgia?
As with other civil cases, you will need to prove the elements of negligence in a medical malpractice claim:
- The defendant (the party you’re suing) had a duty of care. This duty varies depending on the situation. In medical malpractice cases, a doctor or healthcare provider has a duty to provide reasonable care to a patient in line with the standards of their specialty.
- The defendant failed in this duty of care. We will have to offer the court evidence that your healthcare provider did not act in accordance with the standards of their profession. The fact that you got worse or developed a severe complication does not, on its own, prove that your doctor didn’t live up to the standards of care. There are many circumstances beyond a doctor’s control, and there are often situations where a doctor does everything right, but the patient gets worse anyway. For this reason, it’s necessary to show what actions the provider took that were not in line with the standard of care.
- The failed duty of care caused your injuries. After demonstrating how your provider failed to meet the standard of care, we’ll document how this contributed to your ultimate condition. For example, we might show how your doctor prescribed a medication that was contraindicated for patients with your medical history. Then, we might explain why this medication is contraindicated, how it increased the risk of a severe health problem, and how you subsequently developed it.
- You suffered damages as a result of your injuries. Damages include medical bills, lost income or earning potential, pain and suffering, permanent disability or disfigurement, and more.
Who Can You Sue for Medical Malpractice?
Sometimes, clients ask if they can sue a provider who is not a doctor. In most cases, the answer is yes.
Georgia law allows you to sue any healthcare provider authorized by law to perform a healthcare service. This may include nurses, doctors, dentists, physician’s assistants, dental hygienists, anesthetists, and more.
You can also pursue a lawsuit against a hospital or medical facility for malpractice performed by its employees, although this may not always be necessary. While Georgia doesn’t require medical malpractice insurance for physicians, most healthcare facilities do require it for doctors they employ.
However, other employees, like nurses or technicians, usually don’t have malpractice insurance, so if one of these workers was responsible for your injuries, we may pursue a case against the facility.
It may not be immediately apparent who caused your injuries, so we will investigate the situation thoroughly to learn more. Sometimes, a patient may believe their doctor was at fault, but we find it was someone else.
For example, you might think your doctor prescribed the wrong medication because you were given the wrong medication, and it caused a life-threatening condition. However, upon examining your records and other evidence, we might learn that the doctor prescribed the correct medication and a nurse dispensed the wrong drug.
In this case, we might file a claim against the healthcare facility for the nurse’s error. Nurses, technicians, medical assistants, and other healthcare workers all have their own professional standards of care, and we will work to determine if these standards were met.
What Are Some Common Types of Medical Malpractice?
Here are some types of malpractice that occur frequently:
Medication Errors
As discussed above, these can happen in multiple ways. A physician might prescribe the wrong medication for your condition—especially if its name is similar to another, very different drug—or a dangerous or ineffective dose of the proper medication.
Alternatively, the pharmacist might read the order wrong. Finally, a nurse might dispense the wrong medication or dose in a hospital setting.
One review of studies found that the median error rate for medication mistakes in hospitals ranges from 8 to 25 percent.
Surgical Errors
There are many ways a surgery can go wrong while the patient is unconscious and has no idea what’s happening. As a result, you may wake up and learn you suffered complications during your surgery, but you might not be clear on why.
All surgeries have risks, and your surgeon may remind you of this instead of explaining exactly what happened and why. The complications of your surgery aren’t always apparent right away, either.
Sometimes, for example, a surgeon accidentally leaves a surgical tool or instrument inside the patient, leading to intense pain. Initially, the patient may be told that post-operative pain is normal because it is.
But as time passes and the wound heals, their pain doesn’t go away. At this point, they could see multiple doctors, some of whom might believe the patient is only trying to get pain medication.
In Georgia, the statute of limitations for medical malpractice is two years, either from when the injury occurred or when it should have been reasonably discovered. Patients who have seen multiple doctors in an effort to get a diagnosis are likely to have made a reasonable effort to discover the cause of the problem. If you’ve recently learned that a surgical instrument was left inside you, please contact a lawyer immediately so we can help you seek compensation.
Failure to Diagnose Your Condition in a Timely Manner
Post-surgical complications aren’t the only reason you might struggle to get a diagnosis.
We’ve met many people who suffered from pain or other symptoms for months and were repeatedly told the symptoms were “nothing” or “just stress.” Often, the physicians in these cases didn’t run any tests or make any further effort to diagnose the cause of the symptoms.
By the time the patients received a diagnosis, their conditions had worsened and were more complicated or even impossible to treat.
If you believe a doctor’s failure to diagnose a severe health problem harmed you, please speak with an attorney right away.
Failure to Warn You About Risks
Risks are associated with any treatment, medication, or procedure you might need. Surgery is often the most risky, and you will be asked to sign a consent form stating that you understand the risks, such as infection, blood clots, excessive bleeding, nerve damage, and worsening of the condition being treated.
However, the fact that you signed a form with a list of potential risks doesn’t always mean you gave informed consent. If a procedure is especially risky due to the nature of the surgery or your own personal medical history, your doctor should tell you that.
They must explain why the procedure is particularly dangerous for you and what the alternatives are (if there are any). Finally, they should answer any questions you have.
If you believe that your doctor glossed over the risks and didn’t give you an accurate understanding of the situation, they may have been negligent.
Failure to Mitigate Risks
On the other side of the coin, properly explaining the risks of a procedure to a patient doesn’t mean that the physician can ignore them. The doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who perform surgery or other treatments still have a duty to reduce risks as much as possible.
If your doctor or the healthcare facility fails to take reasonable steps to prevent complications, they may be negligent.
This type of negligence can happen in a wide variety of ways. For example, a doctor might fail to review the patient’s chart at appropriate intervals after surgery, and miss signs the patient is developing a severe complication like an infection or blood clot.
Another example might be if the surgeon failed to prescribe a medication to reduce the risk of a particular complication. Or, the hospital might not use standard infection-control protocols, like frequent cleaning and disinfecting of patient rooms and equipment.
Prescribing Unnecessarily Complicated or Aggressive Treatment
If you have a common and easily treatable condition and your doctor insists on trying a complex and extreme treatment first, you may want to seek a second opinion. For example, if your condition can often be treated with medication, but your doctor wants you to have surgery immediately, you might have cause for concern.
There could be a reason why your doctor is recommending such an aggressive approach, but they should be able to explain it clearly.
How Can You Get Help From a Gwinnett County Medical Malpractice Law Firm?
Please contact the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm for a free, confidential consultation about your case. Our legal team will review your records, answer your questions, and consult medical experts as needed.
We’ll explain your options for pursuing compensation. There is no obligation, and if we do take your case, you won’t owe us anything until we win or settle it.
Attorney Ali Awad founded the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm and has since expanded it into one of the fastest-growing law firms in the country. He and his legal team have over twenty years of combined experience and have recovered millions of dollars for injured people and their families.
When he’s not negotiating with insurance companies or fighting for clients in the courtroom, you can find Mr. Awad on social media, giving no-nonsense legal advice to more than a million followers.
Work with him today by calling (470) 323-8779.
