If you’re worried about your health, your doctor should always be your first port of call. You can trust them to remain confidential about your problems and help you to find a solution. The majority of doctors are well trained and will offer you suitable treatment for any health issues that you have. But it’s important to remember that they’re only human and sometimes, they make mistakes. You can’t expect them to be completely accurate all of the time and in some cases, they might misdiagnose you. As long as they followed proper procedure and carried out all of the right tests, nobody is really to blame in that situation. However, there are some cases where the doctor can be held to account for their mistakes because they didn’t do their job properly.
If you’re going in for surgery, for example, and a doctor makes a mistake that puts your health at risk, they are liable for that and there are steps that you can take. If you think that your doctor might have made a mistake, here’s how you should deal with it.
Get A Second Opinion
If you’ve been to the doctor with an issue and they’ve tried all sorts of different things but nothing seems to be working or the problem is getting worse, your first thought is probably that they don’t know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, it is sometimes incredibly difficult for certain things to be diagnosed correctly without the help of a specialist. It might just be that your doctor has done everything that they need to do but they don’t have the knowledge and experience to recognize your problem. Before you start pointing fingers, it’s worth getting a second opinion. See a few other doctors, explain your situation and what previous doctors have tried. They might be able to shed more light on the issue and get it resolved.
Understand The Legal Definition Of Negligence
A doctor can only be taken to court for negligence if it can be shown that they didn’t meet their job requirements and either through action or inaction, they damaged your health further. It’s important that you understand this definition because you probably won’t be able to file a medical negligence claim if multiple doctors have examined you and can’t identify the problem. If all of those doctors did what was required of them, it won’t be considered negligence. Before you start spending money on a legal battle, you need to be sure that the doctor wasn’t doing their job properly.
File A Claim
If you’re certain that the doctors could have done more or they made mistakes during the process that damaged your health, it’s time to file a claim. There is a time limit imposed on these kinds of claims and if you leave it for too long, you might not be able to take it to court, so you need to do this as quickly as possible. Get in touch with a law firm like Van Sant Law, LLC who have good experience dealing with these kinds of cases. They’ll be able to explain the process to you and tell you what they need from you.
Gather Evidence
A court isn’t just going to take your word for it when you say that your doctor didn’t follow the correct procedure when treating you, you need to be able to prove it. You need some physical proof of the conversations that you had with your doctor and the action they took to help you. Notes from consultations, medical reports, and correspondence between doctors will all help to strengthen your case. You will be able to collect some of this evidence for yourself but your legal team will contact the medical professionals to request all of the notes and reports. No matter how irrelevant something might seem, you don’t know when it might be important so be thorough and collect all of the evidence that you can.
Medical Witnesses
All of that evidence won’t be enough to make a claim against a doctor because you’re not a medical professional. You can argue that they didn’t do their job properly but you don’t have the authority to make that claim. That’s why medical witnesses are so important. You need to find impartial medical experts to review the case and decide whether the doctor was negligent, what impact this had on your health, and whether they think the doctor is liable for any impact that their treatments had on your health. Without these witnesses, you don’t have a case.
Medical negligence cases can take anywhere from eighteen months up to three years so make sure that you’re prepared for a long battle.