Birth Injury Blog

Posts Tagged ‘medical malpractice’

Lawyers involved in medical malpractice lawsuits, sadly know that birth injuries happen in hospital settings on a regular basis.

Even being surrounded by professional during the delivery, but birth injuries can still happen. Birth injuries can be caused by medical error or hospital negligence on the part of medical professionals, and does in many cases.

Babies that sustain a birth injury may end up going through life with great difficulty.

Some brain injuries can resolve on their own, but others lead to mental and/or physical problems for life. Various complications can occur that cause a birth injury, but most are a result of events associated with fetal delivery.

During either an abdominal or vaginal delivery, problems can be led to by a variety of circumstances.

These circumstances can include things like the baby being too big, lack of oxygen, mistakes from professionals in addressing these issue, waiting too long to perform a C-section, and even the failure to perform pre-natal testing and monitoring.

Problems like these don’t always cause birth injuries, but these complications can make them more likely to happen. When they do happen, babies can frequently recover. Recovery from a birth injury is something that babies may not be able to do totally, in many instances. Read the rest of this entry »

Birth injury lawsuits are handled as medical malpractice claims by birth injury attorneys. The premise of these legal cases is that a medical professional did not provide patient care within the limits of the accepted “standard of care”. In other words, it is the job of your attorney to prove that your child’s birth injury was directly caused by the negligence or error of a medical professional. This could be the doctor, a nurse, a medical technician, or other healthcare professional whose negligence or lack of attention caused a medical mistake.

While most doctors, nurses, midwives, and hospital technicians provide a high standard of care for their patients, unfortunately, many families are harmed by medical mistakes. Parents of a child suffering with a birth injury should contact an experienced injury attorney to research the cause of their child’s condition. Medical mistakes are responsible for many birth injury cases and it would be impossible for a parent, alone, to determine if medical malpractice caused their child’s injury. It is only through the dedicated and thorough efforts of a legal and medical team that the cause can be ascertained.

Different mistakes may constitute medical malpractice including:
• They did not fully inform you of the risks before treating you,
• They did not determine the proper diagnosis of your condition,
• They did not perform appropriate diagnostic testing,
• They did not properly treat your condition,
• They did not perform the operation properly, or
• They did not anticipate a problem which they should have.

The most common birth injuries are cerebral palsy, oxygen deprivation, mental retardation, Erb’s Palsy, Klumpke’s Palsy and Brachial Plexus injuries. The ability to file a medical malpractice claim when birth injuries are of a permanent nature provides the possibility for both the newborn and its family to recover monetary damages.

Examples of Monetary Damages
• Past and future medical expenses;
• Past and future loss of earnings;
• The cost of future care (i.e., aides, devices, counseling, physical therapy, tutoring)
• Conscious pain and suffering
• Loss of services