09/06/2016
“Has there been medical malpractice?” and “Should I sue?” are often asked questions.
Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, sometimes bad things happen and a patient may get a bad result…birth injury, heart attack, stroke, paralysis, blindness, or even death…the list goes on. Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and it is simply no one’s fault.
Yet, there are times when a bad outcome in medicine involves medical malpractice. Someone has “dropped the ball” and has fallen below the “Standard of Care,” meaning a health care provider was not as careful or as skillful or as knowledgeable as a reasonable health care provider would have been in the same circumstances. This is also called “negligence.” If that negligence results in harm to the patient, then there is medical malpractice.
Malpractice may range from the acts of grossly reckless physicians to the acts of good and respected doctors who were momentarily negligent causing injury to the patient. Ethical physicians and hospitals will want to work with their patients and insurance companies to honestly compensate patients for the damages caused by their negligence whether gross or momentary. But sadly, this is far too often not the case.
Like kids playing ball in the street who run away after breaking a window, health care providers may try to run away and hide from taking responsibility for harm done. But doctors and hospitals are not kids, they are highly trained and well paid providers of medical services; and injured patients are not broken windows, they are precious humans who have put their very lives into the hands of the medical professionals. Taking responsibility for negligence is always the ethical thing to do.
