When a doctor, dentist, hospital or an allied health care professional fails to provide competent care, and this results in harm, victims and their families can make a compensation claim.
Examples of medical negligence claims
Failure to diagnose
Surgical mistakes
Failure to warn of risk
Birth trauma or injuries
Delayed diagnosis or misdiagnosis
Failure to investigate underlying condition
What is medical negligence?
When you go and see a doctor you expect the highest level of expertise and professionalism. Doctors and other healthcare providers owe a duty of care to patients.
Medical negligence is when a medical professional breaches their duty of care and acts in a way that deviates from accepted norms or standards and this causes harm. There are three elements to a medical negligence claim:
- Breach of duty: this is about the doctor’s or healthcare provider’s conduct. Did they act in a way that fell below accepted standards?
- Medical causation: Here, the question is whether the health professional’s breach caused your injury or condition. This can be difficult. As the injured patient, it falls on you to prove that if the health professional had not breached their duty of care, your injury would not have occurred.
- Compensation: if the health professional’s breach of duty caused you injury, you are entitled to compensation. The amount of the compensation depends on several factors. You can claim compensation for pain and suffering that you have had to endure (and will endure), lost income and loss of future income (and loss of super), the costs of any necessary additional medical treatment, any other travel, medication and related expenses. These are just a few examples, and depending on the severity of the situation additional compensation can also be claimed, such as the costs of medical aids, home care and so on.
Who can be liable to pay damages for medical negligence?
It’s important to remember that it’s not just doctors who can be liable for medical negligence. There is a wide variety of health care professionals that owe patients a duty of care and who may be a respondent in a negligence claim. For example:
- Hospitals
- Nurses
- Dentists
- Cosmetic injectables providers
- Specialist surgeons
- Anaesthesiologists
- Pharmacists
- Nursing homes
- Obstetricians
What to do if you believe that your health professional was negligent?
Firstly, if possible ask your doctor what went wrong and why. It’s important to keep in mind that sometimes undesirable or unsuccessful outcomes can happen without any negligence on the part of the doctor or health professional.
Ask your doctor to give you a plain English explanation of what happened. From there if you believe there was negligence, consult a compensation lawyer with experience in medical negligence cases.
How can Denes Lawyers help you?
After our initial consultation, we would first investigate your claim. This involves getting your medical records and obtaining an expert report from a specialist to see if your claim is viable. If you try and do this on your own, one difficulty which you may encounter is that doctors are reluctant to say bad things about other doctors. On the other hand, we have access to experts who can provide reliable opinions in a wide range of medical specialties.
We also investigate the health professional who may have been negligent. We check their background and we have had instances where we were able to obtain records from AHPRA (the regulator) which showed that the health professional had been involved in similar situations in the past.
If we think you have a claim, we will then quantify how much compensation you are entitled to, and then take all necessary steps to secure compensation on your behalf.
Medical indemnity insurance
Every health professional must have professional indemnity insurance. This means if we make a claim against your doctor, you can have peace of mind that if we are successful, the doctor’s insurance company will be required to pay you compensation.
For many years before starting Denes Lawyers, our principal solicitor, Oszkar Denes, used to act for insurance companies. He knows how insurance companies defend claims, what are their pressure points and how they assign a value to the claim. Find out more about Oszkar here.
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It covers common mistakes to avoid, key time limits, dealing with insurers, and how to maximise your compensation.
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