We trust our doctors to take care of us, and when they fail to do this, it can be deeply traumatizing. If you have experienced medical malpractice, you deserve a fair settlement. Every case is different, and the amount you get for your settlement will depend on a few factors. Here’s what your medical malpractice attorney wants you to know.
Ask a Medical Malpractice Attorney: How Much Is My Claim Worth?
Economic Damages
When considering how much money to award for a medical malpractice case, there are a couple of different types of damages that a judge will consider. First, they’ll take into account the economic damages that you have suffered.
This means any calculable financial losses that you may have incurred because of the injury. For instance, if you must go to physical therapy or you had to make extra visits to the doctor because of your injury, this would all count towards your economic damages.
Pain and Suffering Damages
The other type of damage that the judge is going to consider is pain and suffering. This refers to any non-economic damages that you have incurred over your medical malpractice case. There are a couple of different types of pain and suffering, the first being physical. For example, if you experienced a surgical error that caused you pain, this would be considered part of your claim.
Emotional pain and suffering is another type of damage that you can be compensated for. After your injury, you may have experienced mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or PTSD, and you deserve to be compensated for these problems.
How Do I Prove a Medical Malpractice Case?
Hire a Lawyer
The first thing you should do if you are entering into any kind of legal battle is to hire a lawyer. Representing yourself to save money may seem like a good idea, but this is rarely, if ever, actually the case.
Your lawyer has spent many years in school training to work in the legal system, and they have many additional years of experience actually doing the work. If you want to make sure your case has the best shot, work with a qualified surgical error lawyer in Baltimore.
Gather Your Documents
For your case to have a chance, you need to prove that a medical professional-patient relationship existed and that your doctor or practitioner owed you a duty of care. You will then need to prove that that duty of care was breached by failing to provide you with the standard of care.
To prove this, you’re going to need to make sure you have all your medical documents. Things like doctor’s notes, medical bills, prescriptions, and receipts of any payments that you’ve made can be used as evidence.
Keep a Pain Journal
One of the things you’ll need to do is prove that you suffered an injury in the first place. It can also help to show the extent of the injury to the judge and how it’s affected your quality of life overall by keeping a pain journal.
You should start writing in this journal as soon as possible and update it every day. In each entry, describe your injury and how it’s feeling on that particular day. You can also describe any treatments that they are getting. Since you can also be compensated for emotional pain and suffering, describing your state of mind in these entries can also be helpful.
Video and Photo Evidence
If you can, gathering photographic and video evidence can do a lot to help with any type of legal case. Pictures of the injury and any other relevant evidence can help support your case.
In some situations where there has been a surgical error, you may even be able to get video evidence. Not all surgeries are filmed, but if your surgery was, this video evidence could show who was involved in the medical malpractice case along with what the specifics of the incident were.
Witness Statements
If there were any witnesses to your injury, then their testimony can help your case too. Your lawyer may have access to expert witnesses, which can be especially crucial in medical malpractice cases. These are experts in their fields who can be hired to provide testimony to support your claim.
When claiming medical malpractice, you must prove that your doctor acted in a way that a more competent doctor with similar training and experience would not have. An expert witness may be a doctor in the same field who can explain to the court what went wrong and how your doctor should have behaved.
If you have experienced medical malpractice, you may feel lost and frightened. These can be notoriously difficult cases to handle, but when you work with a qualified lawyer, you’ll have the best shot at getting compensated for the trauma you’ve experienced.
