The elements of a malpractice case are the same as for any personal injury case. A duty must be owed to the injured person. The duty must be breached, and that breach must be the cause of an injury. Lastly, there must be damages from the injury.
The four elements are discussed below.
1. Duty Owed
While there are different levels of duty and situations where a person does not have a duty to another, usually the health care provider has a duty to his patient. All professional health care providers who have a relationship with a patient have a duty to that patient. The patient/health provider relationship is often established when the doctor, nurse, etc. begins treating the patient. This is usually the easiest element to satisfy in a medical malpractice case. The health care provider has a duty to use established standards of care when treating a patient. A health care ovider is held to a standard of other providers with similar education and in a similar situation.
2. A Breach of Duty
A health care provider breaches his duty to his patient when he does not act according to standards for his profession. For example, an emergency room doctor may be held to a different standard than a pediatrician who does not have experience treating gun shot wounds or fatal trauma. When a health care provider ignores symptoms he should have recognized, or when a nurse accidentally administers a lethal does of medication, the standard of care is breached. A doctor is expected to have knowledge that an average person would not have and the doctor is expected to act accordingly.
3. The Breach of Duty Caused the Injury
The breach of duty, or the act which was not up the standards of care, must be the cause of the resulting injury in order to bring a medical malpractice suit. It is often difficult to determine what causes an injury or what caused something to go wrong during medical treatment. So many things can go wrong through no one’s fault. It is possible for someone to have surgery and have horrible complications afterward, even though every health care provider did everything according to the standards of medical care.
4. Damages or Injury to the Patient
While all of the previous elements might be met in a case, all four elements are necessary to bring a claim for medical malpractice. Damages are not the same as injuries. It is possible for a health care provider to make a mistake while treating a patient resulting in an injury, but if there are no damages, there is no claim. A person may be injured slightly, or may not be any worse off due to the injury because the patient had other injuries. An example of this would be a person with cancer who misses some chemotherapy and dies.
A person would have to prove the wrongful death would not have occurred if the patient had the chemotherapy. While some damages are easy to assess like lost wages or replacement services, some damages are not related to money. Damages can be pain and suffering, or can be a loss of the ability to do things a person could have done if not for the injury. Sometimes damages are difficult to determine without the help of an experienced medical malpractice attorney.
