Failure to Diagnose and Defensive Medicine
A doctor’s failure to diagnose a patient’s medical condition is the most common reason why patients sue their doctors. This statistic also includes a doctor misdiagnosing a patient and/or delaying their diagnosis.
What is Failure to Diagnose?
Failure to diagnose is caused by a doctor’s negligence or failure to take the specific steps necessary to determine the nature of your illness. This negligence then causes you harm, as treatment is either delayed or isn’t administered at all, due to there being no record of it.
Pregnancy-Related Injuries and Maternal Mortality
What is a Pregnancy-Related Injury?
A pregnancy-related injury is an injury that a woman sustains during pregnancy, at delivery, or shortly after delivery. These injuries can range from mild to severe with the worst cases resulting in death – known as maternal mortality. 700 women die each year in the United States due to pregnancy-related injuries resulting in maternal mortality.
What is Maternal Mortality?
Maternal Mortality is a term used to explain the deaths of women during their pregnancies and childbirth. Startingly, pregnant women in the United Starts are more likely to be at risk for maternal mortality than in any other developed country.
Birth Injuries and Cerebral Palsy
What Is Cerebral Palsy?
Cerebral Palsy is a neurological condition which commonly presents through disordered movement, muscle tone, and posture. It is caused by damage affecting your child’s developing brain before and/or during birth – this is why it is considered a birth injury.
What separates cerebral palsy from other birth injuries is that its effect on functional abilities varies significantly. This means that the medical costs associated with the condition will also vary, and the emotional strain on you and your family will be affected as well. For example, some individuals with cerebral palsy may have an average intellectual capacity whereas other individuals may not.
Nursing Negligence
Nursing negligence is a type of medical malpractice whereby a nurse, who is fully capable of providing quality nursing services, does not care for you the way a reasonable nurse would. The result of this is unnecessary suffering on your behalf.
Types of Nursing Negligence
There are five major types of nursing negligences that can occur:
Wrongful Death
What Is Wrongful Death?
Wrongful Death occurs when you, or someone you know, is killed because of a healthcare practitioner’s negligence or misconduct – whether intentional or not.
It is different from medical malpractice in that medical malpractice occurs when your healthcare provider is negligent, and you are harmed but your injury isn’t fatal. Wrongful death, on the other hand, occurs when you, or someone you know, dies as a direct result of medical negligence.
Failure to Diagnose
In 2013, Johns Hopkins researchers found that diagnostic errors – such as failure to diagnose – accounted for the largest fraction of medical malpractice claim payouts. Diagnostic errors also resulted in the most severe patient harm and the highest total penalty payouts.
In fact, Doctor David E. Newman-Toker at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that diagnostic errors could easily be the biggest patient safety and medical malpractice problem in the United States.
Anesthesia Errors
Anesthesia is one of the fundamental components of any medical procedure. There is great risk involved when administering anesthesia, but it a risk that generally has to be taken in order for certain medical procedures to be conducted successfully, and so that you do not feel any pain throughout.
What Are Anesthesia Errors?
Anesthesia errors are a form of medical malpractice which is due to medical negligence. It occurs when an anesthesiologist, or another medical practitioner, fails to administer, or incorrectly administers, anesthesia during your medical procedure. These errors can result in injury, disability, and even death.
Doctor Errors
Unlike a general medical error, which can be caused by various healthcare professionals and associated personnel, doctor errors are specific to your treating doctor.
What Are Doctor Errors?
As with general medical errors, a doctor error is a preventable adverse effect of care that you suffer at the hands of your doctor which causes you harm.
Blunder # 1: Misreading a Mammogram
According to a recent study, in almost 16% of the cases, radiologists will report false-positive cancer readings in mammogram x-rays. Many of these radiologists are younger and newly trained doctors who may be likely to make more errors in interpretation than their more experienced counterparts.
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that only if the radiologists could compare films from their earlier mammogram screenings, the rate of these “false-positives” could be lowered significantly.
Dr. Joann Elmore, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington (School of Medicine), says that it is alarming how common false-positives have become in the US. She also said that false-positives are most likely to occur in the case of breast cancer mammogram screenings but it shouldn’t discourage women from having annual check-ups.
Birth Injuries and Medical Malpractice
Birth Injuries and Medical Malpractice
Before a medical malpractice case can be brought forward, an understanding of birth injury is required. Additionally, several criteria need to be met in order to classify as a birth injury. If these criteria cannot be met, then a case of medical malpractice cannot be made.
What Is Birth Injury?
A birth injury is a physical injury that your baby and/or the mother received before, during, or just after the birthing process.