Demonstrating that a doctor fell short of their duty of care can be a challenging process. While most doctors try their best to correctly diagnose conditions and provide timely medical treatment, they can’t always be right. In every state, protections are in place to shield practitioners from some litigation. These give practitioners peace of mind on the job and protect hospitals that are doing their best with limited resources. However, these laws also set the bar for receiving compensation incredibly high.
Overall, to win a favorable judgment, you must be able to prove four elements:
Duty:
It must be clearly shown the defendant had a duty or an obligation. In a medical malpractice situation, the attending medical professionals have a moral duty of care that is a part of their profession.
Breach:
It must be proven that the defendant fell short of the expectations of their duty.
Causation: A causal link must be made between the harm suffered and the breach of duty.
Damages:
The damages being sought must be directly related to the harm caused.
Each of the above elements is essential to a case — if anyone is missing, your chances at making a successful claim are limited. For example, if you’re neglected by a medical professional but the mistreatment doesn’t cause injury, you won’t be eligible to make a claim. Likewise, if your condition worsens but no breach of duty of care occurred then, making a claim will not be worthwhile. Importantly, however, at no point must a plaintiff prove that a doctor or nurse acted with the intention of causing harm — simply showing that their carelessness caused harm and fell short of the duty of care is sufficient.
Perhaps the most challenging of these elements is to prove is causation. Drawing a direct link between the condition of you or a loved one and the treatment (or lack thereof) you received requires an extensive amount of evidence that may not exist. For example, if a doctor gives a misdiagnosis for a serious illness like cancer, you would only be eligible for damages if you can prove that the delay in treatment worsened your condition.
For your best chance at a successful claim, it’s important to keep a record of all of your medical appointments and, if possible, the conversations between you and your doctors. This information can be used to establish a clear timeline of the treatment you’ve received and how it lines up with the state of your condition. This information can be especially useful if a doctor gave you a misdiagnosis or if a hospital system was incapable of booking you an appointment for an extended period of time. Both could be an example of negligence, depending on the circumstances.
Most likely, you’ll also need the testimony of a medical expert to advance your case. If effective, an expert can explain the norms of their profession and make clear how the professional accused of negligence fell short of this standard. Additionally, an expert may be able to help make the case for why this breach of duty of care correlated to the victim’s plight.
