If your loved one gets injured in a hospital or outpatient facility, it’s normal to feel angry and eager for justice. However, while your friend or relative may have left the facility in worse health than they arrived, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a medical malpractice case. To learn what meets these qualifications, here is a quick overview. 

What Is Negligence?

When a doctor displays negligence, they provide care that is beneath the standard expected of their rigorous training. If a judge decides that a doctor’s actions or decisions were negligent, they will verify that an equally skilled doctor would have been able to do a better job. However, just because a doctor is negligent doesn’t mean they conducted medical malpractice, as the negligence has to reach a certain level to gain this classification.

What Is Medical Malpractice?

Say the doctor diagnosed your child with a heart condition when they actually had an anxiety attack. In this case, they may have gone ahead and ordered tests, prescribed medications, or even performed surgeries your child didn’t need. This could have put your child through unnecessary pain or caused further physical harm.

Other examples of medical malpractice include a doctor who doesn’t explain the risks of a treatment to a patient—such as the risk of fatality during heart surgery—and avoidable errors during a procedure, such as failing to give a patient enough anesthesia during surgery.

For a doctor’s mistake to be considered medical malpractice, it must fall under the “applicable medical standard of care,” meaning it must be out of the ordinary. In a court setting, the judge is responsible for establishing this standard of care by hearing from medical experts before presenting a ruling.

If you believe you have a medical malpractice or negligence case, reach out to Neimark & Neimark. Serving Rockland and Orange counties, NY, they have over 40 years of experience helping clients receive the compensation they deserve, whether they were facing car accident injuries or property damage. To learn more about their skills in the courtroom, visit the website. Call (888) 725-7424 to arrange a free consultation.