Medical Negligence: How The Standard Of Care Affects Your Success Or Failure In Court
If you're considering filing a medical malpractice lawsuit, you need to understand that the success or failure of the case rests on whether or not your attorney can effectively demonstrate negligence on the part of the physician. Moreover, proving negligence is largely a debate as to whether your physician violated or upheld the standard duty of care relating to your specific injury, operation, or treatment. This article discusses how a medical negligence attorney can help establish that the presiding physician failed to adequately perform his or her duties, and ultimately ensure you are awarded compensation that is sufficient to help remedy your current state.
The Standard Of Care
A doctor's standard of care is essentially an overarching set of guidelines that is in place to ensure that physicians treat similar injuries and illnesses with similar levels of care. In other words, its purpose is to ensure that a similarly skilled physician would have treated a patient with a similar injury in the same manner as any other doctor would have with any other patient with the same injury. An attorney might establish a breach to the standard of care in your situation by examining similar cases and how the doctors in each case treated their patients. If there are any glaring or obvious distinctions, then your case has a good chance of moving forward to the next stage.
How The Lack Of Care Resulted in Harm
Once a breach to the standard of care has been established, the next phase of litigation entails not only a detailed description of exactly how you care was below that standard, but, more importantly, how the lack of care resulted in further harm, injury, distress, or what have you.
This last part can be the most difficult in a medical malpractice lawsuit because it might not be clear how the physician's failure directly resulted in any additional suffering for you. While the connection might be clear to you, your attorney, and friends and family, delineating a clear path from "doctor's failure to provide care" to the injury or pain that came about as a result is something you need a skilled attorney to handle. A malpractice lawyer understands what the courts need to see in order to conclude that your physician's breach of the standard duty of care was indeed what ultimately caused your subsequent pain and suffering.
Overall, once you demonstrably prove that your doctor's lack of care was what caused your eventual suffering, than it is simply a matter of determining the appropriate degree of monetary compensation to rectify the circumstances.