If you have recently been in hospital and suffered a worsening in your condition down to the hospital’s neglect, you will be eligible to make a claim. Your claim will be for ‘clinical negligence’ or ‘medical negligence’ as it is also known – essentially a breach of duty of care.
You may be able to claim for clinical negligence for both NHS and private medical and dental work and claims could arise following any sort of treatment from cancer treatment, to anaesthetics, cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, radiology, mental health treatment, plastic surgery, general practice, keyhole surgery, oncology, orthopaedics, sterilisation, vascular surgery – to name just a handful.
Doctors may be held responsible for breach of duty of care if they have: failed to correctly diagnose an illness, failed to warn of risks or side effects of treatment, failed to obtain consent, made errors with medication, made errors in surgical procedures or delayed referral to specialist medical staff. Doctors are usually held accountable but any member of a medical team may also be responsible from midwives to nurses, physiotherapists to psychiatrists.
In order for a negligence claim to be successful, the patient (or other claimant) will need to demonstrate that the member of staff responsible for their care was negligent in management and that the harm was caused as a result; they must prove ‘liability’ and ‘causation’. The claimant’s loss is then looked at in terms of ‘quantum’ – this is the loss of current and future earnings, the quality of life and the mental anguish that they may experience. The compensation is always financial.
When a claim is made against a medical professional, more focus is placed on the standard of care given than the result of this care itself. A claimant needs to be able to show that the standard of this care was lower than should be expected from a trained professional in their arena. In the majority of cases, an ‘acceptable’ standard of care is one which complies with the principles and codes that are set out by the medical associations involved.