It Can Happen to the Very Best: 3 Types of Medical Malpractice Patients Can Sue You For

The last thing that any doctor wants to face is a malpractice suit. Any doctor gets into medicine so that they can help as many people as possible, but mistakes do get made. It is obviously very unfortunate, both for the doctor and the patient, so having liability is of vital importance for all parties involved.

  1. Misdiagnosis

When a doctor performs an examination it is, unfortunately, the case that sometimes he does not correctly assess the condition that the patient is suffering from. For the patient, this can lead to the condition going untreated, which, given certain conditions can prove very dangerous, even life-threatening.

Misdiagnosis can also mean that the patient ends up receiving unnecessary treatment, which although it may, in the best-case scenario, has no lasting physical effects, is still unnecessary. Obviously, in the worst outcome, it can cause complications that would have never occurred had the procedure not occurred.

There is a qualification on whether the misdiagnosis is malpractice, and that is whether or not the doctor failed to do everything another doctor would have done in the same situation. If this can be established then malpractice is applicable.

  1. Failure to Treat

It is possible to make the correct diagnosis and then fail to follow through on the correct treatment.

This can result from a doctor being overwhelmed by the number of patients that they are treating, and some patients may slip through the cracks. It is basically a form of negligence in regard to basic patient care and follows up.

Failure to treat is sometimes referred to as putting profits over safety and constitutes a doctor not doing due diligence to make sure that the patient is receiving the correct level of care.

This obviously represents a pattern of mistakes made by the doctor for a prolonged period of time  and is going to be established through documentation.

  1. Surgical Errors

The forms that surgical error can take are numerous, but all of them can have very serious consequences.

Whether it involves performing the wrong procedure, causing damage to tissues or organs, leaving medical equipment in the patient after surgery, or any other number of unfortunate mistakes, the patient’s quality of life can be significantly affected.

The fact that a patient signs something that acknowledges the possible risks that are present during surgery does not excuse or account for surgical error, and thus a malpractice suit can be brought to bear against the surgeon in question.

With surgical errors or any of the other kinds of malpractice that you can be sued for, having liability insurance for doctors is an essential protection for you as a doctor.

Conclusion

It is definitely understood that you can have been in practice for a long time and make an unfortunate mistake. Having insurance in the case of one of these unfortunate eventualities is good practice. In the case that you made no mistake you need to have the funds available to defend yourself, and if you unfortunatel;y did make an error, you need to be able to make that damage right, as much as is possible.