When Medical Care Falls Short: Understanding Your Legal Rights
Ideally, every medical procedure undertaken in the UK would be successful, and the patient would make a full recovery. Unfortuantely, reality is sometimes far from ideal. Sometimes, even routine treatment goes wrong. Sometimes, the failure amounts to negligence, either on the part of an individual practitioner, or on the part of an entire organisation.
What Constitutes Medical Negligence?
Medical negligence can take many forms. A doctor might diagnose you with the wrong illness, causing a delay in your receiving the correct treatment. A surgeon might cut into the wrong organ, or leave a foreign object inside a patient’s body. A pharmacist might dispense the wrong medical, or attach the wrong instructions to the right one.
What unites all of these instances is a failure in the medical practitioner’s duty of care. For medical negligence to have occurred, however, the patient will also need to have been harmed by the failure. Incompetence that you haven’t been harmed by, almost by definition, is not medical negligence.
The Importance of Legal Guidance
Victims of medical negligence have a right to pursue compensation through the courts. This is a right enshrined in the NHS charter. However, the process of doing this can often be intimidating, especially to those unfamiliar with how the law works in practice. For this reason alone, it’s worth seeking the guidance of a legal professional with particular expertise in medical law. If you’re based in Yorkshire, for instance, you might look at the medical negligence solicitors Leeds has to offer.
Steps to Take if You Suspect Negligence
For best results, it’s worth following a particular process when it comes to medical negligence. To begin with, you’ll want to collate evidence, before filing a formal complaint against the organisation responsible. The NHS provides special guidance on navigating its internal processes.
Getting compensation often means seeking out a second opinion. This will provide evidence that the original opinion was faulty, which could prove crucial if you seek to escalate to a courtroom. In the vast majority of cases, however, medical negligence isn’t decided in a courtroom; instead, the two sides tend to reach an agreement outside of it.
As such, everyone can avoid the time, stress, and money wasted on formal proceedings whose outcome is easy to predict. A good solicitor will guide you through this process, and keep you advised throughout it.
