Patients trust their doctors to help them feel better, but doctors can make mistakes. Unfortunately, those mistakes can have serious consequences for your health and wellbeing.
If you were injured from a medical error, you could benefit from having a seasoned personal injury attorney in your corner. A Lima medical malpractice lawyer can review your circumstances and help represent you on your pathway to recovering compensation.
General Principles of Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice occurs when a doctor or another medical professional harms their patient by failing to adhere to the standard of care all caretakers must follow. To bring a claim for medical malpractice, the plaintiff must show that a doctor-patient relationship existed at the time the incident occurred. Then, the plaintiff must show the doctor was negligent and that their negligence directly caused harm to their patient. Those injuries must also have manifested into specific damages such as physical pain, medical bills, or lost earning capacity.
What is the Standard of Care in Medical Malpractice Cases?
The ordinary standard of negligence is different for medical doctors than for other people not in health care. As a qualified Lima medical malpractice attorney can explain in further detail, doctors are held to a higher standard of care.
More specifically, physicians must act with the same level of care as any other health care professional with the same training and experience would act under similar circumstances. Malpractice plaintiffs usually need to enlist an expert in the medical field to prove that a doctor deviated from the medical standard of care.
What Does Legally Actionable Malpractice Look Like?
Because there are so many different types of treatments that doctors may need to provide for different kinds of injuries and illnesses, there are also a wide variety of ways in which a doctor’s misconduct could rise to the level of legally actionable malpractice. Here are some of the most commonly used grounds for medical malpractice litigation, which our experienced Lima attorneys at Charles E. Boyk Law Offices can help you pursue.
Failure to Diagnose
One of the most straightforward ways in which a medical professional’s negligence can directly lead to a patient suffering preventable harm is if that professional fails to identify that anything is wrong with that patient despite being presented with clear signs of a serious problem. Sometimes, this just looks like a doctor ignoring or brushing off symptoms reported by a patient, but it can also stem from a doctor misinterpreting test results, performing a test incorrectly, or receiving unclear or incorrect information from labs that process test results.
Misdiagnosis
A similar but slightly different form of medical malpractice from failure to diagnose is a misdiagnosis—in other words, a doctor diagnosing a patient with a condition other than the one they are actually dealing with. This could lead to that patient experiencing a dangerous delay in receiving the treatment they actually did, which can have life-altering and even life-threatening consequences when it comes to conditions like cancer. Alternatively, a misdiagnosis can lead to a patient suffering harm from the unnecessary treatment they received thanks to your misdiagnosis—consider, for example, how traumatic going through chemotherapy could be if it turned out you never even had cancer to begin with.
Medication Mistakes
Medication errors often go hand-in-hand with misdiagnoses, since someone being diagnosed with the wrong illness could lead to them being prescribed the wrong medication to treat what is actually wrong with them. However, mistakes like this can also take the form of a doctor not prescribing the right dosage of medication for a particular patient, not communicating a prescription clearly to a pharmacy, or someone at that pharmacy filling the prescription incorrectly or mixing up different customers’ orders.
Anesthesia Errors
Anesthesiologists are paid extremely well for their services largely because of how dire the consequences of an anesthesia error can be. If a patient does not receive enough anesthetic, they may experience severe physical pain and/or wake up while undergoing surgery. If a patient receives too much anesthetic, they may suffer life-threatening complications that very often turn fatal.
Errors During Surgery
Unfortunately, “wrong site surgery”—meaning a surgeon conducting an operation on the wrong organ, soft tissue, or part of the body altogether—happens a lot more often than you might think, and it can virtually always serve as grounds for a malpractice surgery. Likewise, mistakes in how surgical procedures are conducted often qualify as legally actionable malpractice as well, and so do errors like a surgeon leaving a foreign object inside a patient’s body and then sewing them up without removing it.
Injuries During Childbirth
Childbirth can be an intensely traumatic process even if you have the best possible medical care, and unfortunately, newborn infants are especially susceptible to suffering life-altering disabilities from trauma they sustained while being born. Mothers in labor can also suffer extremely serious injuries and complications if they are not closely monitored and properly treated by qualified medical professionals, so problems like postpartum hemorrhage and placental abruption can also justify lawsuits in many situations.
Lack of Post-Treatment Care
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the role of a doctor in caring for their patient’s wellbeing does not end once they finish actively treating that patient. If your doctor allowed you to suffer avoidable harm by failing to provide sufficient post-operative care or simply failing to clearly instruct you about how to care for yourself at home, it may be time to contact a Lima medical malpractice attorney and discuss your options for civil recovery.
Medical Malpractice Filing Requirements in Lima
Ohio state law establishes a statute of limitations by which an injured patient can bring their medical malpractice claim in court. According to Ohio Revised Code §2305.113, plaintiffs have one year from the date a medical error occurred to file an ensuing lawsuit.
Plaintiffs may get an extension to the one-year limit under two exceptions. First, plaintiffs can file their lawsuit within one year of the date they discovered their injury, rather than the date of the error itself, if they were not able to identify their injury while exercising reasonable care and diligence. However, four years is the maximum period of time in which any medical malpractice lawsuit may be filed.
The second exemption allows plaintiffs to extend their one-year filing deadline to file by an additional 180 days if they notify the presumed defendant during the one-year statutory period of their intent to sue. A seasoned physician error lawyer in Lima can discuss the applicability of these exceptions to a particular case.
What is the Affidavit of Merit Requirement?
Ohio state law requires that a plaintiff file an affidavit of merit with their complaint in a medical malpractice case. An affidavit of merit states to the court that the plaintiff’s claim is credible. The affiant, or expert filing the affidavit, must declare under oath that they:
- Have reviewed all of the plaintiff’s available medical records
- Are familiar with the medical standard of care that applies to the plaintiff’s situation
- Believe the medical professional deviated from the standard of care
- Believe the plaintiff’s injuries resulted directly from the failure to uphold this standard
Recovering for Short-Term and Long-Term Losses
Obviously, money alone cannot completely erase the negative impact that a serious medical error can have on your life, especially if that error leads to a condition like cancer getting preventably worse. However, what civil compensation can do in a situation like this is minimize the damage that your doctor’s misconduct will do to your and your family’s financial security, as well as reimburse you at least to some extent for the various physical, emotional, and psychological forms of harm that your injury has caused and will cause you to experience.
Economic Damages
“Economic damages” are losses that have objective financial values that can be established through quantitative information like bills, receipts, invoices, and pay stubs. Of course, the costs of additional medical treatment you need to alleviate the harm done by a previous physician’s negligence will likely represent the bulk of economic damages in a typical medical malpractice claim.
However, you can also seek recovery for things like lost income due to time missed from work, as well as disability-related expenses for things like wheelchairs, home/vehicle modifications, and in-home assistance. Furthermore, it is not just possible but often crucial to account for economic losses that you have not yet experienced by the time your case begins but which you can reasonably expect to experience in the long term, such as costs of future rehabilitative treatments and lost future earning capacity.
Non-Economic Damages
As you might guess based on what is written above, “non-economic damages” are losses which do not have objective financial values, and which instead must be valued based on qualitative evidence like personal testimony, input from subject matter experts, and precedent established through court rulings on similar claims in the past. These are sometimes referred to as “pain and suffering” damages, because physical pain and suffering is the type of non-economic loss that most often factors into malpractice claims and most other types of personal injury litigation.
That said, you can also recover for the negative impacts of emotional distress, psychological trauma, and a decline in your expected quality and enjoyment of life caused by a long-term disability. Once again, it is possible to demand compensation for non-economic losses well in advance of when they fully manifest in your life with the help of a Lima medical malpractice attorney.
What Are Punitive Damages?
Technically, a court can also impose “punitive damages” against the defendant(s) in your malpractice claim in addition to making them pay for your economic and non-economic damages. As the choice of terminology suggests, punitive damages are meant specifically to punish a defendant for extremely egregious misconduct, and that money can then be awarded to the plaintiff filing suit against that defendant as a means of making up for the unusually unjust treatment they were subjected to.
However, under O.R.C. §2315.21, courts are only allowed to impose punitive damages against someone who did one of the following things:
- Acted with intentional malice towards the plaintiff,
- Engaged in “aggravated or egregious fraud,” and/or
- Knowingly authorized and/or participated in the egregious misconduct of someone over whom they had direct authority.
Since it is very uncommon for medical professionals to act in any of these ways, it is also uncommon—but not unheard of—for punitive damages to play a role in malpractice lawsuits. Work with a Lima medical malpractice attorney to understand what compensation you could be eligible to receive.
Are There Damage Caps for Medical Malpractice Claims?
Unlike some other states, Ohio state law does not impose “caps,” or artificial limits, on the total amount of money you can demand for economic damages through a medical malpractice claim. Unfortunately, though, there are caps placed on recovery for non-economic damages, as your Lima medical negligence lawyer can explain in more detail.
Most of the time, O.R.C. §2323.43 prevents you from demanding more than $250,000 or three times the total value of all your economic damages combined, whichever is greater. Furthermore, you generally cannot demand more than $350,000 for non-economic damages from a single defendant or more than $500,000 from all defendants combined, no matter what the value of your economic losses is.
However, those latter two maximum caps change if you suffer any of the following effects from a doctor’s negligence:
- “Permanent and substantial” disfigurement,
- Permanent loss of a limb or the meaningful use of a limb,
- Permanent loss of normal function in a bodily organ system, and/or
- Any permanent physical injury that renders you unable to care for yourself on a daily basis without help.
In those situations, the most your Lima attorney can demand for non-economic recovery from a single defendant in a medical malpractice case is $500,000, and the most you can demand from all defendants combined is $1,000,000.
Filing Suit Over a Fatal Malpractice Injury
If a doctor’s misconduct directly leads to a patient of theirs passing away prematurely, that patient’s right to sue does not pass away with them. Instead, it passes to the “personal representative” nominated in their will—or, if needed, by a court—to manage their affairs after their death, who then has standing to seek compensation on behalf of that patient’s surviving immediate family members.
“Wrongful death” claims like this can demand money for damages that surviving family members will experience because of their loved one’s death, including lost future financial support, lost love and companionship, and emotional anguish. If necessary, a Lima medical negligence lawyer can also help a personal representative seek recovery for losses experienced by the deceased patient themselves—for example, outstanding medical bills and physical pain caused by their injury—through a “survival action.”
Consult a Lima Medical Malpractice Attorney to Recover Your Losses Today
Going through a medical scare can be distressing. After suffering due to a health care provider’s negligence, you should not have to fight legal battles to get reasonable compensation on your own.
It could be beneficial to you to seek the aid of a Lima medical malpractice lawyer who can represent your interests zealously and compassionately. To learn more about your recovery options moving forward, call now to set up a consultation.
