While most medical professionals ensure patients are treated carefully and get the best treatment and care possible, mistakes do happen. Furthermore, a medical professional can injure a patient due to neglect or bad practice, which is known as medical negligence or sometimes clinical negligence. If you suffer an injury because of malpractice by a medical professional then you have the right to claim for compensation.
What causes medical negligence?
Medical negligence can be caused by all sorts of bad practice, including, misdiagnosing or diagnosing a condition too late, errors in surgery, failing to provide treatment, conducting the wrong treatment, issuing the wrong medication or wrong dose, or injuring a mother or child during birth. While you are entitled to make a claim for personal injury compensation if you are injured because of medical negligence, it does differ in several aspects to other compensation claims, which is why you need to speak to a personal injury specialist as soon as possible.
Length of time for cases to be settled
Medical negligence cases can often take longer to settle than other forms of personal injury claims. This is due to the fact that cases are often complex in their nature and the need for the opinion of expert, third party medical professionals.
In addition, different rules apply as to the length of time during which you can claim for compensation. In most personal injury cases, you can only claim for compensation three years from the date on which an injury occurred. However, in medical negligence cases, you have three years from when you first discovered there had been negligence or malpractice, which could be many months, or even years, after the incident occurred.
Making a claim for medical negligence
Because medical negligence cases can be extremely complicated, you need to find a specialist personal injury solicitor to handle the case for you. A solicitor may require you to see a specialist doctor or surgeon to back up your claim or it may be necessary to request documents such as medical records, all of which makes medical negligence cases expensive to pursue. However, as with other personal injury cases, medical negligence claims can be conducted under a no win, no fee agreement so no matter what the costs of pursing damages, you won’t have to pay anything upfront.
