Incorrect diagnoses, surgical errors, or negligent treatment can result in intense pain and suffering. Moreover, when medical providers make mistakes, it can cause serious harm not only in terms of physical health but also emotionally and financially.
You don’t have to go through these difficult times by yourself. Reach out to knowledgeable Boston medical malpractice lawyers. Our law firm is ready to hear your story, support you, and make sure you receive fair compensation.
- Boston Medical Malpractice Attorneys
- What Is Medical Malpractice?
- Meet our team!
- Types of Medical Malpractice Claims in Massachusetts
- Components of Medical Malpractice
- What Damages Can Be Recovered in a Medical Malpractice Case in Boston?
- How to Determine if Your Case Qualifies as Malpractice
- Client Reviews
- Building a Case for Medical Malpractice
- Statute of Limitation for Medical Malpractice in Massachusetts
- What Our Boston Medical Malpractice Lawyer Can Do for You
- Contact a Boston Medical Malpractice Attorney Today!
- 30-Day, Risk-Free Guarantee
Boston Medical Malpractice Attorneys
You may feel confused about your next steps after experiencing medical malpractice. You could hesitate to start a claim, hoping things get better or to avoid conflict.
But if you don’t file your claim early, you risk losing an opportunity to get fair compensation. As time passes, the crucial evidence becomes outdated. Above all, medical malpractice isn’t the simplest area of law, and you can easily get lost without a lawyer. What does this mean? You may only receive a small percentage of the compensation you’d have received otherwise.
A reliable personal injury lawyer can handle every detail of the malpractice law, safeguarding your rights and interests. They collaborate with a multitude of medical professionals who can offer evidence to strengthen your case.
Medical malpractice lawyers are also first-class mediators who will do their best to negotiate a fair settlement. This will allow you to focus on recovering and starting a new, better chapter of your life.
What Is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice is when healthcare providers, such as doctors and nurses, make major mistakes that harm their patients. For instance, if a doctor misses a critical problem during an examination, or a nurse provides incorrect care to a patient after surgery, their actions could be considered malpractice.
However, not every negative outcome can be caused by malpractice and qualify for a legal case. Even with proper medical care, there are cases when treatments don’t work. So, it’s necessary to prove that the doctor acted negligently. This proof is crucial for successful medical malpractice claims and fair settlements.
In addition, medical malpractice lawsuits are important not only to obtain justice and compensation but also to further improve the healthcare field. Holding negligent medical professionals responsible will reduce the likelihood of similar mistakes in the future.
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Types of Medical Malpractice Claims in Massachusetts
Even though some of the scenarios listed below may sound alarming, we’re sharing them to describe what medical malpractice may look like. It’s a quite broad term, involving many different areas of medical care. Here are some of the most common medical malpractice claims we see in Massachusetts.
Birth Injuries
Birth injuries are life-altering for babies and their families. They’re often caused by oxygen deficiency, such as in the case of cerebral palsy, which results in a lack of coordination and movement.
Another birth injury is hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which is characterized by severe cerebral damage. Erb’s palsy leads to arm disabilities, up to paralysis. In addition, mothers can be either slightly injured or get severe tears and pelvic organ damage during delivery.
Misdiagnosis or Delayed Diagnosis
The importance of an accurate diagnosis cannot be underestimated, as mistakes or delays can result in serious consequences. For instance, if cancer isn’t caught early, it can spread and become much harder to treat, sometimes even becoming fatal.
Undiagnosed heart conditions may trigger heart attacks. Infections that go unnoticed may escalate into sepsis. Even things that look minor initially can become major problems if they’re not diagnosed and treated correctly.
Surgical Mistakes
Surgical mistakes can create a lot of issues for patients. Wrong-site surgery could mean that someone ends up losing the wrong limb or organ. Mistakes with anesthesia can lead to serious problems like brain damage, organ failure, or even death.
You’d think hospitals are the cleanest place, but sometimes germs slip through, resulting in serious infections that require additional surgeries to fix. Nerve damage is also a possibility — one little mistake, and a patient could end up dealing with chronic pain or a body part that just doesn’t work right anymore. In any of these cases, the victim should be compensated for the medical professional’s negligence.
Prescription Errors
Medicines are meant to help us feel better, but when things go wrong, they can have the opposite effect. For example, allergic reactions from the wrong medication can be risky. Errors in dosage can lead to organ damage or even fatal consequences.
In addition, when doctors prescribe several medications, they must pay attention to how these drugs work together. Finally, using the wrong meds for a long time can create serious health issues or lead to organ failure.
Wrongful Death
When we talk about medical malpractice, there’s nothing sadder than wrongful death. Wrongful death can happen because of any of the medical mistakes we’ve discussed above.
Any significant medical error, if serious enough or not fixed, could lead to wrongful death. This emphasizes how important it is to give proper care and attention to every little thing in medical treatment, whether it’s just a routine check-up or a major surgery.
Components of Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice cases aren’t just about declaring that a doctor made a mistake. There are specific legal conditions that need to be met for these cases to be valid. The following critical factors must be shown and proven for a medical malpractice claim to work out.
Duty of Care
This is where everything starts. Duty of care is the legal responsibility that medical providers have towards their patients. Basically, this means that when you walk into a doctor’s office, that medical professional is taking on a legal duty to treat you with the right amount of skill and care. This obligation covers every part of your treatment, from diagnosis to aftercare.
Additionally, this duty isn’t just for doctors. Nurses and other medical professionals also have a duty of care to their patients within their own specific roles.
Deviation from Duty of Care
This is where issues begin to arise. This component demonstrates that the healthcare provider didn’t meet the required standard of care. It’s about not providing the level of care that a qualified professional would typically deliver. This may include mistakes in diagnosis, selecting unsuitable treatments, or failing to provide adequate follow-up care.
To prove this deviation, it’s usually important to compare the actions of the healthcare provider to what a reasonably skilled specialist would have done under similar circumstances. They could point out that the potentially liable party overlooked clear symptoms, neglected to conduct essential tests, or made mistakes in interpreting results. This is how we can differentiate between unavoidable complications and real doctor’s negligence.
Direct Causation
It’s not enough to just prove a healthcare provider made a mistake. For a malpractice case to be strong, we need to show a clear link between professional negligence and the patient’s injury or illness.
In most medical malpractice cases, this is a really challenging part. Sometimes, the connection is obvious — let’s say, operating on the wrong body part. But other times, it can get more complex, especially for patients who were already sick.
The main thing is to show that the patient’s situation got worse, or that new issues popped up directly because of what the provider did or didn’t do. To prove causation, we often need detailed medical evidence and expert opinions, as defense lawyers tend to argue that the patient’s health would become worse anyway, no matter what the provider did.
Damages
The last step in the process is showing that the patient actually faced harm and losses because of the healthcare provider’s negligence. This harm can look different for everyone — it might be physical pain, extra medical bills, losing a job or a part of an income, and more. In wrongful death cases, the damages could cover funeral costs and the loss of financial support for the family.
In medical malpractice cases, damages can be both economic and non-economic. Economic damages have a clear monetary value — they include, for example, medical bills or lost wages. Non-economic damages are harder to assess as they can involve emotional distress and the loss of enjoyment in life. Our medical malpractice attorneys can help you calculate them.
What Damages Can Be Recovered in a Medical Malpractice Case in Boston?
When someone gets injured because of medical malpractice in Boston, they might be able to get paid for different types of damages. Here are some types of losses for which you can recover compensation:
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Medical expenses
Costs for extra treatments, surgeries, medications, and rehabilitation needed because of the malpractice.
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Lost wages
You can recover compensation because you couldn’t work while recovering, plus get paid for any future earnings if the injury affects your long-term ability to work.
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Pain and suffering
These are non-economic damages for the physical pain and emotional stress caused by the malpractice.
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Loss of enjoyment of life
This is financial compensation for not being able to enjoy everyday activities and hobbies due to the serious injury.
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Punitive damages
In rare situations, you might get extra damages to punish the healthcare provider so other patients won’t be impacted by similar behavior in the future.
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Wrongful death damages
If malpractice leads to someone’s death, family members can recover funeral costs, lost financial support, and compensation for their loss.
Our team of experienced attorneys can help you determine the possible damages in your particular case and make sure you get fair compensation.
How to Determine if Your Case Qualifies as Malpractice
First of all, as we’ve mentioned earlier, not every negative medical result counts as malpractice. Sometimes, even with the best intentions from doctors and nurses, treatments just don’t work out, or complications happen.
That’s why, to have a strong medical malpractice case, you need to show that a healthcare provider’s negligence actually caused you harm. So, your medical malpractice lawyers must prove that the care you got was below what’s expected in the medical field. Furthermore, it’s not enough for a doctor to just make a small mistake; their actions have to be far from what a good professional would do in the same situation.
Timing also plays a role in your case eligibility. There’s usually a limit for medical malpractice cases from the time you discovered the injury or when you should have found out about it.
The severity of the injury you’ve experienced is another key aspect involved. Such cases can get pretty complicated, so the damages have to be serious enough to make it worth initiating legal proceedings.
Therefore, if you want to determine if you have an eligible case, consult with our knowledgeable Boston medical malpractice attorney. They’ll take a look at the details of your situation, evaluate how strong your claim might be, and give you some advice on what to do next. At Michael Kelly Injury Lawyers, we offer free first consultations for medical malpractice cases and work on a contingency fee basis, so you can get expert advice without worrying about money.
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Building a Case for Medical Malpractice
When you plan to prove negligence in a Massachusetts medical malpractice lawsuit, you need solid proof — and plenty of it. Let’s explore the documents and records that could change your case’s course for the better.
- Medical records: These should cover your whole medical history tied to the incident. What could they include? Everything from doctor’s notes that explain your symptoms and other observations to nursing logs that track your daily care and any shifts in your condition. You should also collect laboratory results and imaging tests like X-rays or MRIs. All these records put together a timeline of your treatment and can reveal the point where things might have gone off track.
- Informed consent documents: The forms you filled out before starting your treatment explain the risks and benefits of a medical procedure. They’re critical if you think you didn’t get all the information about possible complications and risks of the procedures or treatments.
- Prescription records: If you’re dealing with medication errors, these records will be helpful. They can show if you received the wrong medication, the wrong dose, or if there were any dangerous drug combinations.
- Expert medical witnesses: An experienced medical malpractice lawyer will help you find a medical professional who specializes in the relevant field. They will go through all your records and share their thoughts on the quality of the care you received from another specialist.
- Medical bills and financial records: These documents emphasize how the supposed malpractice has affected your budget. They cover hospital bills, extra treatment or surgery costs, receipts for medical equipment or medicals, and proof of lost wages. With these documents, medical malpractice lawyers can calculate the economic damages and determine the compensation you might be entitled to.
Statute of Limitation for Medical Malpractice in Massachusetts
Medical malpractice victims must also know about the statute of limitations for their personal injury cases. Basically, you have three years from when the malpractice happened to file a lawsuit. However, what if you don’t realize right away that you’ve been harmed?
Massachusetts law recognizes this by introducing the “discovery rule.” This means that, in certain cases, the three-year period starts when you figured out or should have figured out that you were hurt because of medical negligence.
When it comes to young patients, the statute of limitations is a little more flexible. It actually starts on their 18th birthday. So, if a kid faces medical malpractice, they have more time to file a lawsuit — until they are 21 years old.
What Our Boston Medical Malpractice Lawyer Can Do for You
The Michael Kelly Injury Lawyers team absolutely understands how stressful medical malpractice cases can be. Our attorneys have been standing up for patients and their families for years, and you can check out the results in our testimonials. If you decide to cooperate with us, we’re here to help you on every step of your case:
- Free consultation: Once you contact us, we’ll analyze your situation, break down your legal options in simple terms, and answer any questions you might have about how to proceed.
- Investigation: Our medical malpractice lawyers will thoroughly investigate your claim. We’ll collect all the important medical records, talk to witnesses, and get insights from medical experts to understand what happened in your situation.
- Expert opinions: We have a network of trusted medical professionals in different fields. These experts will take a close look at your case and provide feedback.
- Building a strong case: With the evidence and expert insights our medical malpractice lawyers gather, we’ll put together a convincing case that demonstrates how the healthcare provider’s negligence led to your injuries.
- Negotiation: We know all the tricks insurance companies use to reduce or deny payouts. Our personal injury lawyers will use their expertise and negotiation skills to make sure you get a fair settlement.
- Preparing for trial: If a fair settlement is impossible, our Boston medical malpractice lawyer will file the lawsuit and prepare all the necessary court documents.
- In court: Our experienced medical malpractice lawyers will advocate for you in court. We’ll represent you, question witnesses, show evidence, and prepare strong arguments for the jury. Our goal is to clearly show the negligence you faced and its consequences.
- Appeals: If it comes to it, we’re ready to tackle any appeals. We have experience in appellate courts and will continue to advocate for you.
- Safe environment: While the legal field could seem impersonal, we work with people who might be going through tough times. Michael Kelly Injury Lawyers are understanding and empathetic. Our medical malpractice attorneys aim to create an environment where you can comfortably provide the details that are critical for the case.
Contact a Boston Medical Malpractice Attorney Today!
When you reach out to us, you’ll discover a team that listens and takes action. Our medical malpractice attorneys have assisted numerous clients in similar situations and know how to build solid cases that lead to real results. We’re here to take care of the legal side of things so you can keep your focus on recovering.
Contact us, and let’s start our partnership with a 30-day, no-risk guarantee. If you’re unhappy with our services in the first month, we’ll return your file for free. Call us or fill out our contact form today to meet our medical malpractice lawyers and start working toward justice and maximum compensation!
