Medical Malpractice

Question: How do I choose an attorney to investigation a potential malpractice claim? Susan: That’s a good question. Medical malpractice is a very distinct and specialized type of law. You want to choose an experienced medical malpractice attorney — an attorney who deals with these types of cases and who has handled these cases in the past. Most law firms now have websites and you can go to the website of the law firm and…

Question: If I think I have been a victim of medical malpractice, what should I do? Susan: I think it’s a good idea to begin documenting. Document what happened. Document everything that happens after the malpractice. Dates of surgery, lab results, if you have a CT scan, the results of the CT scan. Document the names of the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers involved. Question: Times, places of conversations? Susan: Absolutely. And you may…

Question: Should I consider a medical malpractice lawsuit if I have had a bad result? Susan: It depends; a bad result may or may not indicate medical malpractice. Simply because a patient experiences a complication, that does not necessarily mean that there has been malpractice. A bad outcome may be what prompts the client to contact an attorney, but further investigation needs to be done to determine if in fact there was malpractice. The only…

That’s the headline of a recent front-page story in USA Today (March 8-10, 2013). The newspaper reports that doctors sew up patients with mistaken objects inside more than a dozen times a day – the most common being sponges, needles and instruments. The story talks about a woman who had to undergo six hours of emergency surgery in Alabama to remove a sponge the size of a washcloth that was left during her C-section. It…