When you trust a hospital, doctor, or medical staff with your care, you are trusting them with your life. Usually, they will correctly diagnose you, work quickly, and treat you to heal whatever is ailing you. But sometimes, the medical professionals who are supposed to be healing you end up making a medical error that severely injures you, or worse.
When you or a loved one has suffered an injury or death from a medical error, you could use the help of a lawyer. A medical malpractice attorney from DiPiero Simmons McGinley & Bastress, PLLC can get you the financial compensation you deserve for the injuries, damages, or other costs you suffered from medical negligence.
Medical Error Statistics
Even though doctors and other healthcare professionals go through extensive training before they treat patients, they still make medical errors that put their patients at risk. Even though it might seem like this isn’t a common occurrence, research proves differently. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, medical errors are actually the third leading cause of death in the United States.
National health statistics show that nearly 10 percent of deaths every year are caused by medical errors. This comes out to over 250,000 deaths a year, which places medical mistakes in the top three causes of death in our country. Before discovering this data, the rankings for common causes of death were thought to be heart disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease, in that order.
However, the number of deaths a year from medical errors is higher than the amount of people who die from chronic respiratory disease every year. This puts it in the top three, which shows how prevalent fatal medical mistakes can be. Hopefully this data for how many deaths occur from medical professionals making mistakes can help increase awareness and reduce the amount of errors made by doctors and other hospital staff.
What Counts as a Medical Error?
When you’ve gotten care from a doctor or another medical professional that you weren’t happy with, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a medical mistake occurred. You might be wondering what constitutes as a medical error when you’re interested in filing a medical malpractice claim against your doctor. Let’s take a look at some of the most common medical errors that can occur:
- Misdiagnosis
- Missed diagnosis
- Medication error
- Defective medical device
- Infections
- Tools left in a surgery site
- Wrong site surgery
All of these errors can cause serious injuries for a patient who is already in the hospital, which means they’re already dealing with an illness or injury of some sort, and now have to handle further harm. Since medical mistakes have been proven to be more common than most other causes of death, it’s important to know what different events could qualify as an error made in your healthcare. When a doctor makes an error that puts your health at further risk, or even causes you to lose your life, then you likely experienced medical malpractice.
Our Lawyers Can Help You
At DiPiero Simmons McGinley & Bastress, PLLC, we understand that dealing with a medical error can be difficult. Not only are you dealing with the physical effects, like the damage done to your physical and mental health, but you could also be dealing with financial effects like added medical bills and costs. When the injury has caused you to lose wages as well, you could be struggling to provide for yourself and your family. That’s where we come in.
Our medical malpractice lawyer can help you recover what you deserve from the medical error you experienced. We’ll look into what happened and calculate full and fair compensation so you can get back to your normal life. Reach out to us today so we can get started on your potential claim.
