Medical practitioners work under extremely difficult conditions, treating people with serious conditions on a regular basis. That being said, mistakes do happen and under such circumstances, serious consequences can arise.
If you, your spouse or child has been injured as a result of a medical practitioner’s breach of care – you are entitled to compensation. This is applies to all types of medical care, dentistry and even treatment by psychologists and psychiatrists. This type of compensation is often referred to as clinical or medical negligence compensation.
Private healthcare
If this medical negligence occurred in a private healthcare institution you may also be able to claim for breach of contract if you believe the service you received was poor.
Typical Cases
Clinical negligence claims can occur in any aspect of medical care: anaesthetics, gastroenterology, orthopaedics, paediatrics, vascular surgery, accident and emergency, plastic surgery, neurosurgery, gynaecology, oncology and many more.
Reasons for clinical negligence claims include: failure to properly diagnose a patient; delayed diagnosis; failure to warn patients of risk involved in surgery; and failure to obtain consent for using a drug, procedure or surgery that may be harmful to a particular patient in a specific situation.
Making a clinical negligence claim
Making a medical negligence claim isn’t similar to a personal injury case, where it is normally a simple job of seeing where the blame lies. Clinical negligence cases are often significantly more complex.
In order to make a successful clinical negligence claim, you need to have medical experts assess your case in order to prove that no competent medical practitioner could have made these mistakes. This then extends further: it must be also clearly shown that these mistakes directly resulted in the injuries that you are trying to claim for.
If you’re considering making a clinical negligence claim, it’s normally best to contact a clinical negligence specialist rather than any solicitor as they will have the know how to properly assess your case to see whether it’s worth going through with. Making clinical negligence claims can cost a lot of money due to the type of in-depth information that needs to be collected and analyzed.
Clinical negligence experts will normally have a number of specialists to deal with very specific cases. As well as their expert opinions, they can offer advice on a number of additional things, such as financial planning once compensation has been awarded, advice on social care, finance management should you be left unfit because of an injury and so on.
Clinical negligence cases are often a lengthy process, so always speak to an expert before making a claim.
