Medical Malpractice in Washington
Posted Friday, October 26, 2018 by Chris Thayer
When you are sick or injured or a loved one is sick or injured, you put your trust in medical professionals to provide the best care, treatment, and outcome possible. You do not go to a doctor expecting him or her to make mistakes and further injure you or your loved ones. Doctors and medical providers go through extensive training, but this does not mean that they never make mistakes. In these instances, the injured party has the option of filing a personal injury suit for medical malpractice. The aim is to hold medical professionals responsible for injuries that they cause from that incorrect, or negligent behavior. An injured party is often awarded monetary compensation to help them recover from their injuries.
Prior to 2009, medical malpractice suits in Washington were harder to “win” than they are today. This does not mean that winning a medical malpractice suit today is easy, just that there are not quite as many hoops for a plaintiff to jump through to get compensation. A “certificate of merit” was previously required in filing a medical malpractice suit. This certificate was a sworn statement by a medical expert that could declare with “reasonable probability” that the medical provider failed to provide proper care for the patient that resulted in the injuries. This was ruled unconstitutional and is no longer required in a medical malpractice suit. Instead, there are different standards that a plaintiff must meet to hold a provider responsible.
Proving Medical Malpractice
The basic premise of a medical malpractice suit is that a healthcare provider was negligent in his or her care, causing you additional injuries. A medical malpractice suit seeks to compensate you for those injuries. Not every mistake made by a healthcare provider is considered medical malpractice, however. In order to succeed in a medical malpractice suit, a plaintiff must show that the injury sustained resulted from “the failure of the healthcare provider to follow the accepted standard of care.”
There are two elements to proving that the defendant was not exercising the proper standard of care:
- The medical provider failed to “exercise the degree of care, skill, and learning” that other health care providers in the area would use. Each medical provider must act as a “reasonably prudent health care provider” would under the same circumstances; and
- The failure to exercise the proper degree of care was the proximate cause of a plaintiff’s injury.
Proving the proper standard of care can be difficult. However, qualified medical experts can be brought in to make this burden of proof easier to achieve. If you have questions about whether an injury was caused by the medical malpractice of a medical provider, you need a qualified personal injury attorney. The dedicated personal injury attorneys at Pivotal Law Group are here to help you. We know that injuries can be devastating. We want to help you get back on the right track by getting you the compensation you deserve. Contact us today for a consultation.
(image courtesy of Hush Naidoo)