There are many different ways that doctors and other healthcare providers can commit malpractice. Many of the most egregious forms of malpractice are based on some type of negligence. In the medical profession, people owe their patients a heightened duty of care. They violate that duty when they fail to act reasonably in treating their patients. If a patient suffers harm as a result of a provider’s unreasonable act or omission, the provider may be liable for negligence. Here are some of the most common ways that healthcare professionals commit medical malpractice.
Procedural Errors
Some types of medical malpractice are based simply on human error. For example, a doctor could make a serious mistake when administering treatment or performing a surgery. If, for example, a doctor operates on the wrong part of a person’s body, this is a clear example of a negligent mistake.
Failure to Diagnose
People rely on their providers to identify and address health issues. If a provider does not exercise the right level of due diligence and attention in evaluating someone’s condition, he or she is likely to make the wrong diagnosis. Failing to diagnose a condition can cause it to get much worse and thereby become more difficult to treat when a patient finally gets the right diagnosis.
Alternatively, the treatment for a condition that someone does not actually have and is the result of a misdiagnosis can represent an awful and unnecessary ordeal. Ultimately, missing some of the obvious signs of a specific problem or not performing routine diagnostics may make a doctor liable for a misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose a condition.
Medication Errors
Doctors must exercise caution when prescribing medications. The right dosage will not be the same for everybody. Also, many prescription medications interact with one another. If a person has a serious medical reaction because of a mistake with medications, the prescriber may have committed malpractice.
Failure to Warn
Doctors need to make patients aware of the potential consequences of pursuing certain courses of treatment, such as taking a prescription medication or undergoing surgery. As a personal injury lawyer from Disparti Law Group explains, if patients are unaware of the risks, they cannot reasonably make informed decisions when consenting to a treatment. If a patient suffers serious harm after treatment that a provider failed to make a patient aware of, the provider may have been negligent.
People seek out medical help to stay healthy. When treatment has the opposite effect, patients who have experienced significant harm should consider the possibility that they are victims of medical malpractice.