If you do not have the results or recovery you hoped for after a medical procedure, it may just be a frustrating outcome…or it could point to medical malpractice. Understanding what constitutes medical malpractice in Minnesota is critical as a patient so that you can protect your legal rights. Find out if the law is on your side during a free case review with a Minneapolis medical malpractice attorney from Goldenberg Lauricella, PLLC.
What Is Medical Malpractice in Minnesota?
Medical malpractice is a type of tort, or wrongdoing, that could result in a legal claim in Minnesota. Under § 541.076 of the Minnesota Statutes, a medical malpractice claim is “an action by a patient or former patient against a health care provider alleging malpractice, error, mistake, or failure to cure, whether based on a contract or tort.”
A medical malpractice claim has four main components:
- Duty of care: the accused health care provider (defendant) owed the patient a legal responsibility to uphold the medical industry’s standards of care when treating a patient.
- Breach of duty: the defendant deviated from the correct standard of care, failing to treat a patient properly or perform a procedure correctly.
- Causation: the defendant’s breach of duty directly caused the patient’s harm, injury or death, which would have been prevented with proper care.
- Damages: the injured patient (plaintiff) suffered specific losses as an outcome of the malpractice, such as health complications or lasting harm.
These legal elements must be proven as more likely to be true than not true for a successful medical malpractice case. An effective claim could result in financial compensation for your medical costs, pain and suffering, lost wages, and additional damages. If these four elements do not apply to your situation, however, you may simply have a bad medical outcome.
Types of Medical Malpractice
Many examples of medical negligence could lead to poor patient outcomes, debilitating injuries and even death. Common types of medical malpractice that cause patient injuries include prescription errors, diagnosis mistakes, surgical errors, lack of informed consent, inadequate patient monitoring and birth injuries.
What Is a Bad Medical Outcome?
A bad medical outcome can describe any adverse or unfortunate result of a medical procedure. Most medical treatments come with known potential risks, even when a physician does everything correctly. If you gave your informed consent about the possible risks, drawbacks and side effects of a procedure and the health care provider followed the correct standard of care throughout your experience, a negative outcome does not constitute medical malpractice – even if the poor result was unexpected.
How to Determine if You Have a Case
A bad treatment outcome is always a disappointment, but it is not always grounds for a legal claim in Minnesota. There must be evidence that the practitioner or hospital failed to meet the accepted standard of care within the medical industry, and that this failure directly caused your harm or injury.
It is important to get the opinion of a qualified medical malpractice attorney before assuming that you don’t have a case. A lawyer can conduct an investigation to search for evidence of medical negligence and use insights from medical experts to identify signs of the provider falling short of the standards of care. If you do have grounds for a malpractice claim, your lawyer can help you go up against your health care provider to seek the case result that you deserve. To find out whether you have a medical malpractice case, contact Goldenberg Lauricella, PLLC for a free initial case review.