Miami Medical Negligence Attorney

• Misdiagnosis
• Medication errors
• Failure to properly order, perform, or interpret imaging studies
• Failure to properly order, perform, or interpret lab studies
• Failure to request or perform appropriate clinical consultations
• Surgical errors
• Unnecessary surgery
• “Wrong site” surgery
• Failure to remove surgical instruments or tools following surgery
• Early discharge
• Discharging a patient without proper tests

While it is always important to have adequate medical resources available when injury or illness arises, sometimes the vast number of healthcare provides who descend on any one patient at large healthcare institutions, like many found in Miami, leads to confusion, mistakes,  and poor medical decisions.  Doctors and nurses may neglect to communicate effectively, medical records may not be documented appropriately, important tests might be misread or not performed, or patients may be permitted to leave hospitals without important testing.

Some acts of medical negligence are easy to spot:  operating on the wrong limb, misinterpreting x-rays, MRIs or other imaging studies, medication errors, patient mix-ups, leaving behind surgical tools, etc.  Others, however, are not as easy to characterize and sometimes involve the operation of the hospital as a whole, simple administrative tasks, or the failure to follow hospital policies, procedures, and protocols.

Importantly, medical negligence is not, simply, when a doctor makes a difficult but incorrect “judgment call.”  To constitute medical negligence under Florida law, there must be a definitive medical error which falls squarely outside the bounds of widely accepted medical standards and that medical error must directly cause an identifiable injury or wrongful death.

What You Need to Prove in a Florida Medical Negligence Case

First, you must establish that a “patient/doctor” relationship existed such that  a healthcare provider had a legal duty to provide you with medical care.  You must then establish that a medical doctor or other healthcare provider failed to meet the prevailing professional standard of care (i.e. acted negligently) when rendering medical care.  This can mean doing something that a reasonably prudent medical professional would not have done under similar circumstances or failing to do something that a reasonably prudent medical professional would have done under similar circumstances.  Finally, you must prove that the medical negligence directly caused an injury or wrongful death.