Malpractice Suit

Medical Malpractice Suit

Whenever a medical professional or a member of a medical staff causes injury to a patient under their care due to ignorance, neglect or poor judgement, there is a good foundation for a medical malpractice suit. Although there almost is one million people in the USA that yearly are victims of medical malpractice only one third of them file for a medical malpractice suit. A medical malpractice suit can be filed against any professional medical practitioner that has stepped outside what is generally accepted as the professional standards for that specific profession and by doing so cause harm or the death of another human being.

This can range from mild misdiagnosis to pure malicious abuse of patients. Just as long as it happens under that professional medical practitioners care.

Medical malpractice suit – History

Throughout the ages medical malpractice has been followed by some kind of punishment. Although today the most common punishment is some kind of economical compensation to the patient, in ancient Babylonia there was a law that said if a physician failed to do his job, having a patient lose an eye during surgery for example, the physician were to lose a hand due to his negligence. In the Roman Empire a physician could be banned from the country as a punishment for malpractice. Even during the Civil War some surgeons refused to perform some procedures because they were afraid of medical malpractice suits.

Medical malpractice suit – The four conditions needed

In a medical malpractice suit there are four conditions that need to be proven if there even going to be a trial. If only one of these four conditions are false there is no need to go any further with the suit since there is no foundation for it. This might seem harsh but the conditions are quite logical and are there to protect the medical practitioner from false suits. First of all it needs to be proved that the professional medical practitioner actually was responsible for the care of the patient. Secondly there is the question of whether the professional medical practitioner did or did not step outside the generally accepted professional standards. If the medical practitioner did so one can move onto the third condition. The third condition is that it must be proved that this misstep from condition two actually was what led to the harm on the patient. Expert witnesses might be needed for this. Last but not least, the fourth condition that needs to be fulfilled if a medical malpractice suit is to lead to trial is that the harm or the injuries upon the patient that were a result of the medical practitioners malpractice is proven, documented and quantified.

Medical malpractice suit – Medical staff crisis

Over only the latest years many professional medical practitioner has been complaining that it is far to easy to file a medical malpractice suit and making them to hesitate and second-guess every decision they make as almost anything can be thought of as medical malpractice. There actually is an enormous problem defining exactly what “generally accepted professional standards” is as the medical science more or less is racing away. The amount of medical malpractice suits that gets prosecuted has also made the medical malpractice insurance rates to shoot to the sky, leaving medical staff with an actual wage close to minimum.

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Medical Malpractice Suit