The Anatomy Of A Medical Malpractice Lawsuit

Co written by Joel P. Leonard

These materials should provide some comfort and assistance to you the next time a patient or family leaves your office screaming that they are going to go straight to their lawyer.

THE CAUSES OF LAWSUITS

Plaintiff's counsel and consumer advocates would have us believe that bad medical care causes lawsuits. There have been numerous studies suggesting there is considerably more bad care than there are lawsuits. Experience suggests that the quality of care and the existence of a subsequent lawsuit may be practically independent events. You are presumably doing everything you can to avoid bad results. But among the other causes of suits, there are also many are things you can do something about:

A. Bad Communication

Bad results happen--and could be considered a cause of lawsuits by themselves. But lawsuits often happen when the result is worse than the patient or family has been led to expect. This is not always a failure of communication by the health care provider. The patient and family are often not receptive to hearing what the health care providers are telling them.

Realistic expectations and clearly understood follow-up instructions are probably the two best preventative measures for litigation. Documentation of each of these steps also helps. Documentation is a form of communication.

Communication among health care providers is also important. Poor communication among health care providers can lead to mixed messages being communicated to the patient and to finger pointing among the providers.

B. Finger Pointing

Perhaps nothing will be more likely to cause a lawsuit than finger pointing among health care providers and allied personnel. Finger pointing not only encourages lawsuits, it makes a suit very difficult to defend once it has begun. Obviously, avoid finger pointing yourself. If someone else is finger pointing, go to the hospital or a facility risk manager and ask him or her to do something about it.

C. Poor Public Relations

This could be considered part of communication, but it deserves separate mention. Angry people look for ways to fight back. Many patients are already angry by the time they see you because they have had to wait for health care. Brusk or rude treatment following a long wait will leave the patient and/or their family looking for something to complain about.

Most patients and family do not want to be visiting a doctor. Medical offices are not always set up, or managed, to be friendly places. A little extra effort to overcome these stresses can go a long way to making a family love the health care providers who valiantly, but vainly, struggled to save someone's life, as opposed to loathing the malpracticing slackards who rudely disdain to provide essential care.

D. Do Not Overestimate Your Patient

One of the best purposes of documentation is to clearly establish the instructions given to patients. Do not overestimate your patient. Conversely, do not underestimate your patient's ability to fail to follow instructions, or follow them incorrectly. Juries can, and have, found medical malpractice where patients have failed to follow fairly clear instructions and/or where the patients would have followed them if they had understood how important the instructions were.

The advent of pre-printed and/or computerized and customizable forms...

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