If you’ve been hurt by your doctor’s negligence, it’s understandable if you want to sue anyone and everyone who was involved in the substandard care you received. However, a lot of people who try to sue over medical malpractice alone end up learning the hard way how tricky it can be to hold a doctor civilly liable for a preventable injury or illness—and then how hard it can be on top of that to get paid fairly for resulting financial, physical, and personal losses.
Knowing a little bit in advance about how liability in Norristown medical malpractice claims works in practice can be key to effectively enforcing your rights after being harmed by medical misconduct. Here’s a brief overview of what you need to do to prove a medical professional was negligent in caring for you, as well as how you might be able to hold that professional’s employer liable for their actions with a malpractice attorney’s help.
Proving an Individual Doctor Was Negligent
Typically, if you want to hold someone civilly liable for a personal injury, you need to prove they directly caused that injury to happen by violating a general duty of care. However, if you want to establish civil liability for a medical malpractice claim in Norristown, you instead need to prove the doctor violated a specific standard of care by failing to act the same way another equally qualified doctor would have under the same circumstances.
Additionally, you need to have support for your claim from at least one qualified medical expert in the form of a written and signed certificate of merit, which you need to obtain either before you formally file suit or soon afterward. Finally, you almost certainly need to get at least one medical expert—which doesn’t necessarily have to be the same one who signed the certificate of merit—to testify during your claim that they believe you were hurt due to legally actionable malpractice.
Holding Healthcare Organizations Liable for Malpractice
In some situations, malpractice can happen at an institutional level—for instance, if a medical facility knowingly hires people who aren’t qualified for their positions or fails to properly supervise doctors on the job. More often, malpractice stems from individual mistakes by individual doctors, all of whom can be named individually as defendants in a Norristown medical malpractice claim and held individually liable for the role they played in causing the damages.
It’s sometimes possible to hold healthcare companies vicariously liable for the negligence of their employees as long as those employees were performing their normal job duties when they acted negligently. This can allow for much more financial recovery than claims against individual doctors and their malpractice insurance providers are likely to result in.
Learn More About Liability in Medical Malpractice Claims from a Norristown Attorney
Medical malpractice lawsuits can be essential for patients injured by their doctors’ misconduct to seek fair financial recovery for the harm they’ve unfairly sustained. It can be impossible to get paid anything at all if you don’t know how the court decides whether a doctor is legally liable for an injury and how to put forward a strong argument showing the court should rule that way in your situation.
Fortunately, you have help available from respected and experienced malpractice lawyers with proving liability in your Norristown medical malpractice claim. Call Ostroff Godshall Injury and Accident Lawyers today to learn more.
