Without modern medicine, we would still endure plagues that could decimate a third of a continent’s population. Modern medicine saves lives daily through medications, safe surgeries, vaccines, tests, scans, and more.
However, modern medicine isn’t perfect and has also caused significant harm. Thousands of Americans suffer serious injuries or even death due to medical errors each year.
To help make the medical industry safer for everyone, you must contact a medical malpractice lawyer at the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm, especially if negligent healthcare professionals or medical facilities have compromised your health.
The CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm, based in Atlanta, GA, prioritizes every medical malpractice case. We hire the best medical experts in the South Carolina area to thoroughly analyze our medical malpractice cases, allowing us to pursue financial compensation on your behalf while protecting your legal rights.
For a free consultation, call us today!
Why It’s Important to Hire Our Goose Creek Medical Malpractice Attorneys
Medical malpractice cases are often more complicated than traditional personal injury cases. Healthcare professionals undergo specialized training and must meet state licensing requirements to ensure they are qualified to treat illnesses and injuries.
However, even the most highly trained doctor cannot prevent all bad outcomes.
Because of this, special rules apply. South Carolina laws tend to protect doctors and hospitals by preventing “frivolous” lawsuits for damages.
However, holding them accountable is necessary when you have suffered genuine harm due to a doctor’s mistake.
Our experienced Goose Creek personal injury lawyers will handle every detail of your case. We will:
- Investigate the Cause: Determine what caused your injury or illness.
- Analyze Medical Records: Locate and analyze all your medical records, including notes made by your medical team.
- Hire Medical Experts: Engage medical experts to testify about the doctor’s mistake and whether it was unreasonable.
- Meet Procedural Requirements: Ensure a Goose Creek medical malpractice case’s detailed procedural and paperwork requirements are satisfied.
- Demand Fair Compensation: Work with financial and medical experts to seek a fair compensation award from the insurance companies.
- Provide a Buffer: Act as a buffer between you and the insurance companies and defense lawyers who might try to pressure you into settling for less than you deserve.
- Advocate for Your Rights: Protect your rights at trial if necessary.
At our firm, you are more than just a number on a file. Our injury attorneys handle your case personally and take the time to get to know you.
We have a reputation for going above and beyond in our fight to get you the compensation you deserve.
Why Choose Our Goose Creek Medical Malpractice Law Firm for Your Next Case?
The CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm is one of the nation’s leading personal injury law firms, specifically focusing on medical malpractice, serving our clients from all over the USA. Here’s why you should choose us:
- Our medical malpractice attorneys are experienced and deeply understand medical malpractice law.
- We devote individual attention to each case to achieve the best possible results for our clients. Our past settlements and verdicts have been life-changing.
- We have the expertise to go up against any party on your behalf, including major hospitals. Our courtroom strength and trial experience give us a solid position to challenge corporate giants.
Choose the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm to ensure your medical malpractice case is handled with the utmost care and expertise.
What Is Considered Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice is a legal term for a situation in which a healthcare provider, such as a doctor, nurse, surgeon, or hospital, fails to provide an appropriate standard of care to a patient, resulting in harm or injury. This negligence or breach of duty can occur in various healthcare settings, including hospitals, clinics, and private practices.
Key elements of medical malpractice typically include:
- Duty of Care: Healthcare providers have a legal and ethical responsibility to provide their patients with a standard of care that aligns with accepted medical practices.
- Breach of Duty: A breach occurs when the healthcare provider deviates from the expected standard of care. This can involve errors in diagnosis, treatment, surgical procedures, prescription medication, or a failure to provide adequate information to the patient.
- Causation: The breach of duty must be shown to cause the patient injury or harm. It must be demonstrated that the healthcare provider’s actions or negligence directly led to the negative outcome.
- Damages: The patient must have suffered harm or injury to pursue a medical malpractice claim. These damages can include physical, emotional, and financial losses, such as pain and suffering, medical bills, loss of income, and long-term disability.
Medical providers are highly trained professionals with years of education and training. However, that does not mean they can always achieve the desired outcomes for their patients.
A poor outcome after a medical procedure or treatment does not necessarily indicate medical malpractice. Instead, malpractice occurs when a healthcare provider fails to meet the accepted standard of care.
Types of Medical Malpractice Cases
Despite modern medicine’s best efforts, bad results sometimes occur after medical treatment that is simply no one’s fault. Not all patients respond to treatment; some may even suffer further injury.
However, there are many instances when a bad outcome results from malpractice.
Medical malpractice can range from grossly reckless actions by healthcare providers to negligence by otherwise good and respected doctors. In any case, the injured patient has the right to recover damages from the negligent provider.
Some of the most common forms of medical malpractice in Goose Creek include:
- Misdiagnosis or Failure to Diagnose: Failing to correctly diagnose a severe disease or illness.
- Delayed Diagnosis: Not diagnosing a condition on time, leading to further harm.
- Failure to Provide Timely Treatment: Delays in administering necessary medical treatment.
- Medication Errors: Prescribing the wrong medication or the incorrect dosage.
- Lack of Standard Follow-Up Care: Failing to provide appropriate follow-up care after treatment.
- Lab Errors: Misinterpretation of lab results or mistakes in the laboratory.
- Failure to Order Necessary Tests: Not ordering tests essential for diagnosis and treatment.
- Anesthesia Errors: Mistakes with anesthesia, such as incorrect dosages, wrong timing, inadequate pre-operative information gathering, and failure to monitor the patient.
- Hospital or Care Facility Errors: Errors include early release of a patient, treating the wrong patient, providing unnecessary treatment, medication errors, and improper patient monitoring.
- Birth Injuries: Harm caused to a baby or mother during the birthing process due to negligence.
If you or a loved one has suffered due to medical malpractice, it is essential to get legal assistance to protect your rights and pursue compensation.
What Is My Medical Malpractice Case Worth?
Several critical factors influence the potential value of a medical malpractice case. Here’s a closer look at each and their possible impact:
- Severity of Injuries: Cases involving severe injuries often result in higher compensation. Severe injuries might necessitate extensive corrective surgeries or long-term treatments to restore the patient’s health. This increased need for comprehensive medical care and rehabilitation usually translates into higher claim values, offering some solace to those severely affected.
- Certainty of Medical Professional’s Liability: A clear-cut case of liability by the medical professional or their employer increases the likelihood of a higher settlement. When the responsible parties are confident they will be found liable, they may settle for a more significant amount. Conversely, if liability is uncertain, the settlement amount may be reduced, or settling could be more challenging.
- Settlement vs. Trial: Settlements are common when insurers’ internal reviews identify a breach in the provider’s standard of care. The amount awarded in settlements or jury verdicts is significantly influenced by injury severity. Jury verdicts in medical malpractice cases can sometimes exceed $1 million.
- Publicity and Litigation Costs: Cases that attract considerable public attention or are expected to incur high litigation expenses may prompt insurers and employers to settle to avoid the spotlight or reduce costs. Professional legal firms specializing in personal injury can utilize their expertise to ensure responsible parties provide fair compensation.
Each of these factors, from the gravity of injuries suffered to the specifics of liability and the strategic decisions regarding settlement or litigation, plays an essential role in determining the compensation value of a medical malpractice case. Victims must hire skilled legal representation to handle these complexities and achieve a just outcome.
Examples of Circumstances That Could Amount to Medical Malpractice
As noted, not every mistake a doctor or nurse makes gives you the right to sue for malpractice.
A valid claim for medical malpractice could arise when your doctor or healthcare provider makes a serious mistake that another competent provider would not have made. Examples of potentially actionable malpractice cases that our lawyers have experience handling include:
- Failure to Diagnose: This can result from not running the proper tests, failing to recognize symptoms, or misinterpreting test results.
- Misdiagnosis: Incorrectly identifying a condition, leading to improper treatment.
- Prescription Drug Errors: Including prescribing the wrong drug, incorrect dosage, or improper medication administration method.
- Emergency Room Errors: Mistakes made in the high-pressure environment of an emergency room.
- Surgical Errors: Operating on the wrong body part or making critical mistakes during surgery.
- Failure to Obtain a Full Patient History: Neglecting to gather comprehensive medical history, leading to improper treatment.
- Anesthesia Errors: Errors in administering anesthesia include incorrect dosages or inadequate monitoring.
- Hospital Negligence: Including mistakes by hospital staff or systemic issues within the hospital.
- Failure to Diagnose Cancer: Missing early signs of cancer that could have been treated more effectively if detected sooner.
- Birth Injuries: Harm caused to a baby or mother during childbirth due to negligence.
- Failure to Obtain Informed Consent: Not properly informing a patient about the risks of a procedure.
- Use of Defective Medical Products: Utilizing faulty medical devices or products that cause harm.
Victims of medical malpractice are often unsure about what happened. It’s common to suspect that something went wrong or, in some cases, to receive an apology from a doctor or nurse for a mistake.
Our injury lawyers in Goose Creek have the resources to investigate your claim. When you hire us, you can rest assured that we will not back down until we’ve done everything we can to get justice for you.
What Is Needed to File a Malpractice Lawsuit?
Suppose you have been injured due to a physician’s negligence and want to sue your doctor for medical malpractice. In that case, there is certain information you will need to collect and review to file a medical malpractice case on your behalf:
Collect All Pertinent Medical Records
If your injuries were sustained because a physician or a hospital staff member made a mistake in treating you, the first thing to collect would be your medical and/or hospital records. Keep in mind that if you plan to sue the hospital for medical malpractice or bring an action against a private physician, your prior medical history may come into play.
The defendant will want to claim that your injuries are pre-existing or your illness is due to another cause. Defendants’ attorneys will do everything they can to shift the blame to another source, often using your medical history to win cases.
Our attorneys spend hours reviewing voluminous medical records to build a solid argument showing that the injuries caused by the doctor’s negligence are not pre-existing or minor.
Be Honest and Forthcoming About Your Medical History
At the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm, we pride ourselves on our attorney/client relationship and the level of respect and trust that goes into it. Information shared within that relationship is legally protected as “attorney-client privileged.”
As we prepare to file your medical malpractice case, it is vital that there be no surprises that may defeat the case later on. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to get the client’s pertinent prior medical records before starting the suit.
Time is of the essence, and often, physicians and their offices do not promptly reply to requests for records, or the doctor has moved to another state, or records cannot be found. Knowing all the facts will help our attorneys better prepare for their challenges in court.
Keep Accurate Records
A medical malpractice case can take several years to come to trial. Over time, people often forget important details concerning their treatment, such as names of doctors, dates of service, diagnoses given, etc.
Making notes of dates, names, bill amounts, and other relevant details will help you prepare better for your examination under oath. Defense counsel may spend several hours depositing the details of your treatment to you.
Our attorney will work with you to get you thoroughly ready to testify, and having a good record or diary will assist in delineating the sequence of events leading to the lawsuit and what has happened since.
Obtain Letters From Employers
If you have been unable to work following your injury, our lawyers will need to obtain a copy of your employment/attendance records to argue that you have been disabled due to medical malpractice and unable to work. Records of time out of work, as well as your prior 1099s or W-2 forms, will assist the economist working with our firm in calculating your past and future lost wages.
We can then claim these monetary damages in your medical malpractice claim or lawsuit.
Gather Witness Information
Having a witness to the medical malpractice committed by the doctor or hospital is very important when starting a lawsuit. A witness could be a nurse present when the doctor treated you, a relative with you in the room when the physician made a mistake, or a surgeon’s assistant who was present during the faulty operation.
Some of these witnesses will have to be subpoenaed to testify, but our lawyers are well-trained in taking intense, effective depositions to help establish fault on the defendant’s part.
Call our firm today to speak with our Goose Creek medical malpractice attorney and meet with one of our highly qualified attorneys to find out if we can file a medical malpractice lawsuit on your behalf.
Goose Creek Medical Malpractice Statutes
Goose Creek has a statute of limitations that limits the time you have to file a claim for medical malpractice. The statute of limitations varies for different types of claims. In Goose Creek, the statute of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits is generally two years and six months from the date the malpractice occurred.
However, certain factors can toll or delay the start of the statute of limitations, such as the minor status of the victim. The time to file a claim against a municipality is different.
Most states follow a discovery rule that allows the statute of limitations to begin on the date of discovery of an injury rather than the date the injury occurred. For example, a doctor might cause a small internal injury that does not manifest noticeable symptoms for months or even years, suddenly causing debilitating pain and requiring corrective surgery.
The application of the discovery rule in South Carolina is more limited than in most other states. The rule only applies to medical malpractice claims involving a surgical sponge or other instrument left inside the patient’s body.
Upon discovering such an issue, the victim has one year to take legal action. The discovery rule may also allow the statute to begin on the date the victim should have reasonably discovered the issue.
Suppose you believe you have a medical malpractice claim. In that case, it is crucial to consult with an experienced Goose Creek medical malpractice lawyer to understand your case’s specific deadlines and requirements.
Contact Our Goose Creek Medical Malpractice Attorneys Today!
When you are ready to hold medical professionals accountable for the damages they have caused due to negligence, medical errors, surgical errors, or failure to diagnose, contact our Goose Creek personal injury attorneys at the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm immediately. Whether you’ve been injured in a car crash or due to medical malpractice, your focus should be on receiving the medical care needed to get your life back on track.
Let us handle the insurance companies and the medical professionals responsible for your pain.
Contact us at (864) 664-3865 or schedule a complimentary initial consultation via email to discuss your Goose Medical Malpractice accident case to ensure your rights are protected and to start your journey towards the compensation you deserve.
FAQs:
- If I am unhappy with the results of my surgery, can that be considered medical malpractice?
Unfortunately, there are no guarantees from a legal perspective when it comes to medical procedures. If the results of your surgery were unsuccessful or unexpected, it does not necessarily indicate negligence. Medical malpractice claims can only be filed against a medical professional who is guilty of negligence, such as not meeting the standards of care or failing to follow the correct procedure. To prove a medical malpractice case is valid, there needs to be clear and convincing evidence that the doctor, dentist, nurse, staff, or hospital neglected to follow the standard guidelines that apply to the procedure.
- If I signed a consent form, am I still eligible to make a medical malpractice claim?
Yes, you may still be able to file a claim to recover financial compensation. Informed consent means that the doctor explained all the possible benefits, risks, and alternative options involved with the medical procedure, and patients are required to provide written consent. However, providing your doctor with written consent only gives them the right to proceed; it does not protect them against acts of negligence. If they deviated from the standard of care and this action led to the worsening of your condition, you may have the right to file a medical malpractice claim against them.
- How long will the court take to award damages?
Medical malpractice lawsuits are serious and typically involve several parties. Consequently, these types of claims can take several months, if not longer, to resolve. Suppose you are suffering because a medical professional caused you injury due to their careless, reckless, or negligent actions. In that case, you should strongly consider speaking with an attorney to protect your rights and help you obtain the fair compensation you are owed.
- Can you request a different judge for a medical malpractice lawsuit?
In some cases, it may be possible to have a case reassigned to a different judge if you believe they were not impartial in their decision. You can also attempt to have your case appealed to a higher court.
