When you seek out medical care in Ohio, you expect your physician to determine what is wrong with you and then appropriately apply effective medical treatments for your health concerns. Unfortunately, a small percentage of those who seek professional medical treatment will receive care that does more harm than good.
Those who do not receive a professional standard of treatment from a licensed physician can potentially file a medical malpractice claim. What is necessary to bring a malpractice claim against a doctor or a facility?
A professional relationship
To hold a doctor accountable for an act of medical malpractice, such as failing to diagnose you or making a mistake while providing you with emergency medical care, they have to have played an active role in your treatment.
A doctor does not need to be your primary care physician for you to hold them accountable for medical mistakes, as you could bring a claim against someone filling in for your doctor during their maternity leave or someone working at the emergency room as easily as your family doctor.
Verifiable medical consequences
For your malpractice claim to result in any amount of compensation, you will need to show that you experienced medical consequences and financial losses because of the treatment you received or the failings on the part of the doctor involved.
Lost wages and revision procedures are among the losses that you could potentially claim in a medical malpractice claim.
Prompt action
You only have a certain amount of time to hold a doctor or a medical facility accountable for substandard medical care. Ohio enforces a one-year statute of limitations in most situations involving medical malpractice claims, but there are cases when a patient has up to four years to file a claim.
Although technically individuals can file a lawsuit on their own behalf, medical malpractice claims are frequently very complex legal matters that require establishing the appropriate standard of care for the situation and then demonstrating how a doctor deviated from that standard. That can be difficult to accomplish even when you are perfectly healthy and may be much more challenging when you are still recovering from the consequences of medical malpractice.
Recognizing when your situation involves all of the necessary elements could help you pursue a medical malpractice claim after a bad treatment outcome or a diagnostic failure.