You undoubtedly visit your doctor or other healthcare professional with the expectation that they will provide you with medical care and treatment to alleviate your suffering and/or prevent further suffering. Sometimes, however, a healthcare professional actually causes suffering instead of alleviating it. When this occurs, you may have the basis for a medical malpractice lawsuit; however, not all errors committed by a healthcare professional are actionable. For a victim to be entitled to compensation the medical error committed by the doctor (or other healthcare professional) must rise to the level of negligence. When determining if an error was the result of negligence the law looks to the standard of care to which healthcare professionals are bound.
Medical malpractice is a highly specialized area of tort law. Tort law addresses injuries to persons and property. All personal injury lawsuits fall under the purview of tort law. Medical malpractice, therefore, is essentially a very specialized type of personal injury. For a healthcare professional to be held liable for damages a victim must first prove that the healthcare professional was negligent. Negligence, in legal terms, requires four basic elements:
- Duty of care
- Breach of the duty of care
- Causation
- Damages
When the defendant is a doctor, dentist, hospital, or other medical provider, the duty of care owed to the victim is evaluated differently than when the defendant is not in the healthcare profession. The standard of care that applies when a doctor commits a medical error compares the doctor’s duty to that of other doctors. Therefore, medical malpractice is frequently defined as “failure to do something which a physician in the same specialty, of ordinary learning, judgment or skill, would do, or would not do, under the same or similar circumstances that existed in a particular case.” In other words, how would other doctors, practicing in the same field of medicine, have acted under the same set of circumstances? If the defendant’s action, or omissions, fell below the standard of care the victim may be entitled to damages for the injuries caused by those actions or omissions.
In order to prove what the standard of care is in a medical malpractice lawsuit, as well as that the defendant’s actions or omissions fell below the standard of care, expert testimony is required. Typically, this requires the testimony of a doctor (or healthcare professional) that practices in the same field of medicine as the defendant.
If you have been injured by what you believe to be medical malpractice, or you have lost a loved one because of a medical error, consult with an experienced Michigan medical malpractice attorney right away. The law provides a method by which you may be compensated for your injuries or your loss; however, the law also limits the amount of time within which you have to pursue that compensation.
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