The Most Common Medical Malpractice Claims

While most healthcare professionals do diligent work to ensure the best possible outcomes for their patients, it’s important to remember that they’re still human. As such, mistakes can occur. However, medical malpractice refers more so when a medical professional’s negligence that they otherwise could have avoided resulted in a patient’s injury. 

While this doesn’t necessarily mean that they intentionally caused harm to their patient, it does mean they often exhibited certain actions that don’t comply with their duty. There are many examples of medical malpractice, but we’ll explore four common medical malpractice claims. 

1. A Delayed Diagnosis or Misdiagnosis 

Many medical malpractice claims are the result of a misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis. Both can result in unnecessary treatments or not enacting the right treatments at the right time. Standard reasons for misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis are:

• Failure to recognize symptoms and clinical issues
• Not ordering the right medical testing or seeking out additional information 
• A medical professional not referring their patient to a specialist or another care provider
• Losing test results or having test results mislabeled 

2. Not Administering the Right Treatment

There are many examples of a patient not receiving the adequate care they deserve. One reason can be not taking a patient’s medical history into account when prescribing medication. Perhaps a patient has an underlying condition that doesn’t respond well to a certain type of medication—information that was readily available in the patient’s medical records. Other examples might include: 

• Not providing the patient with follow-up care instructions 
• Not ordering the right medical evaluations or tests
• Having a patient released from the hospital too early

3. Surgical or Other Errors

All surgeries carry risk and it’s not uncommon for a patient to be harmed during a surgery or even lose their life—whether they’re in the emergency room or it was a scheduled operation. However, some errors go beyond a surgery’s inherent risk and instead stem from negligence. Examples are:

• Performing the surgery or operation on the wrong patient 
• Performing the operation on the wrong part of the patient’s body
• Not complying with appropriate medical protocols before, during, and after the operation 
• Leaving medical tools, devices, gauze, or other foreign objects in the patient’s body

4. Childbirth Injuries 

Babies are fragile and an injury that might be a small annoyance to a fully grown adult can be fatal for a baby’s health. Additionally, injuries can happen before a child is born and even after as well. For prior birth injuries, improper prenatal care is an example as well as failure to diagnose a condition and to inform the mother. Other examples might include: 

• Intentionally or unintentionally handling the baby after they’re born
• Not recognizing a baby’s emotional distress
• Not performing a C-section when deemed necessary
• The umbilical cord becomes wrapped around the baby
• Improperly removing the baby out of the mother’s birth canal

These are four of the most common medical malpractice claims, but there are many more examples as well. If you or a loved one needs to talk to a medical malpractice lawyer, our friends at Greenberg Law Offices are here to help!