Lake County Medical Malpractice Attorney
Rebuilding Lives Shattered by Medical Errors
Lake County medical malpractice lawyer, Kirk Moyer, is fiercely committed to providing exceptional legal representation and advocacy for individuals who were harmed instead of healed by physicians and other medical professionals who made avoidable errors. If you believe that a doctor’s mistake contributed to your health problems or led to the death of a loved one, Kirk can get you the answers you deserve, the guidance you need, and the compensation that can ease your burdens and help you and your family move forward.
Medical Mistakes Are a National Epidemic
Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers study and train for years to get the knowledge, skills, and insights they need to identify, understand, and treat illnesses and injuries. We count on these professionals to fix what’s broken and heal what ails us. While medical science may not have all the answers, and while not every bad outcome is due to an avoidable mistake, patients have every right to expect that the doctors who treat them follow the appropriate standard of care when doing so.
But doctors don’t always do so. They sometimes fail to take the steps they should. They may miss apparent signs of a problem or recommend an inappropriate and potentially harmful course of treatment. They can make avoidable errors because of inattention or carelessness. Quite simply, doctors are human, which means that they can and do make mistakes with shocking regularity, and the consequences of those mistakes are often catastrophic.
Preventable medical mistakes kill 250,000 Americans each year, according to a 2016 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. That makes medical malpractice the third-largest cause of death in the U.S, trailing only heart disease and cancer. That means 700 patients die from a medical error every day. That also means 700 families left in shock and grief every day, wondering why and how things went so wrong.
What Is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice occurs when a doctor, surgeon, nurse, hospital, pharmacist, or other health care professional breaches their duty of care by acting or failing to act in a way that falls outside the appropriate standard of care and, as a result, causes harm to the patient.
Within that broad definition of malpractice lay four key elements that a plaintiff must prove with sufficient, admissible evidence in order to obtain a verdict in their favor. Those elements are:
- Duty of care.
In medical malpractice cases, the duty of care is established by the doctor-patient relationship or similar relationship with the hospital or other health care provider who caused your injury.
- Breach of the standard of care
Once a duty of care is established, a plaintiff must prove that the defendant breached that duty by falling below the applicable standard of care when treating the patient. In other words, it must be shown that the doctor made a mistake that he or she should not and would not have made if they did what a similarly qualified practitioner would (or would not) have done under the same or similar circumstances.
- You suffered an injury.
Medical malpractice lawsuits are supposed to compensate people for actual damages and losses they suffered because of physician negligence. If you did not suffer injuries or losses as a result of an alleged medical mistake, you have no claim for compensation. You also must show that the injury or loss was the result of the doctor’s breach of the standard of care.
- You incurred damages.
You must be able to prove that your injury caused you to suffer damages. These can include “economic damages” such as medical bills, lost income and future earning capacity, and other costs you have incurred as a result of your injuries. You can also recover “non-economic” damages, such as pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of support and companionship, and other damages related to the impact the malpractice and your injuries have had on your life.