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Medical malpractice and medical negligence related compensation claims are a big deal in the UK. In 2016, £1.7 billion was paid out by the NHS as a result of claims for medical negligence, up from £1.4 billion the previous year. Statistics from 2008 show that during that year the NHS’ bill for medical negligence claims UK was at a comparatively low £583 million, which means that in the past decade the value of medical malpractice and negligence lawsuits has more than doubled and is continuing to rise.
Of course, those figures are for the NHS alone, and don’t take into account all of the medical negligence claims against private facilities and practitioners. One area of medicine where negligence claims tend to be high is in cosmetic surgery, where nearly all procedures are carried out on a private and elective basis. Add to that privately-run clinics, hospitals and nursing homes, and it is clear to see that medical negligence solicitors have their work cut out at the moment.
Medical Negligence Claims in the UK
Medical negligence claims can arise for a huge number of reasons, from surgical errors to negligence during pregnancy. The outcome of a situation, in order for it to be a case for a compensation claim, must be that the patient was injured or otherwise negatively affected by the practice they are claiming against failing to adhere to the expected standards or normal medical protocols, and so as you might expect this can cover an enormous range of things, from birth defects in children to botched plastic surgery.
There is a very large number of different niches to medical negligence claims, considering the amount of things that can possibly go wrong when receiving treatment. For example, many specific medical negligence firms such as The Medical Negligence Experts even go as far as to take claims related to medical negligence in dentistry. However, here we are going to look at one of the more common areas of medicine where medical negligence solicitors often deal with claims – medical diagnosis and treatment.
Missed Diagnoses and Medical Negligence
One situation where medical malpractice laws can be invoked is where a patient’s condition progresses because a diagnosis was missed. This can have serious consequences, particularly with things like cancer which can advance rapidly, and where survival rates are directly related to how early the condition is spotted.
Naturally, in order for a diagnosis to be considered ‘missed’ there would have to have been an opportunity for it to be made, where this would normally have happened. A patient whose cancer wasn’t diagnosed but who never went for any tests or spoke to a doctor about any symptoms would be unfortunate, but not a victim of medical negligence. Negligence becomes a matter when the patient wasn’t offered tests that are routinely done for people like them, or people with their symptoms, where tests were done but the results misread, or where the doctor didn’t take the initial symptoms seriously and didn’t recommend any further tests. These are not the only situations where a missed diagnosis could be considered a medical negligence issue, but they do give you an idea of where a doctor’s responsibility to diagnose conditions begins and ends.
As you might imagine, sometimes symptoms simply don’t present themselves until later in the advancement of a disease, or tests don’t show anything that is cause for alarm even though a disease is present, and in these cases the hospital, doctor or other professional is not at fault for the missed diagnosis. However, when the diagnosis is missed in error, or the patient hasn’t been offered the service in terms of tests that would be expected as normal medical protocol for their risk level and symptoms, it can be realistically suggested that the condition would have been diagnosed or diagnosed earlier were it not for their negligence.
These types of cases can result in very large pay-outs, and understandably so, as in some cases a missed diagnosis will lead to a previously treatable condition becoming inoperable, untreatable or indeed terminal.
False Positives
The opposite of a missed diagnosis is a false positive, and this can also be a scenario where medical negligence lawyers may get involved. Some false positives are an unfortunate inevitability of a lot of diagnostic processes, and so a false positive diagnosis of a condition a patient does not have will not usually be grounds for a compensation claim. However, in some cases, a patient may actually start to undergo treatment for a condition they don’t actually have because further testing in line with protocols was not done after the initial diagnosis. This can be where a false positive can become something physically harmful and a matter of negligence.
In some situations, a false positive can cause trauma even when treatment has not yet begun, and if it can be shown that this false positive was a result of diagnostic negligence (for instance, results that were mixed up or misread) rather than the normal margin of error in the tests, or that the information about the diagnosis was presented in an unnecessarily disturbing way (for instance giving a patient a confirmed diagnosis of a life threatening condition without doing further tests), then there is still the potential that this may be grounds for a malpractice claim.
Misdiagnoses
Misdiagnoses are where a condition is present, and a diagnosis is given, but it is wrong. As with missed diagnoses and false positives, this can happen as a matter of course in medicine even when everything is done right, due to the complexities of biology and the limitations of medicine, but in some cases, misdiagnosis can be a medical negligence matter and, when this leads to harm to the patient, it can be grounds for a claim for compensation.
Examples of when incorrect diagnoses occur as a result of negligence can be similar to cases of missed diagnosis and false positives – test results or patient records that get mixed up, doctors not taking patients’ symptoms seriously and recommending the right tests, or failures in the processes of taking and analysing samples.
A misdiagnosis can be a serious problem – for similar reasons to other diagnosis related medical negligence. On the one hand, a patient may begin undergoing invasive treatment, such as surgery or aggressive medicine, for a condition they do not have. On the other, they may be diagnosed with a less serious condition than they actually have, and their illness may progress.
The Importance of Medical Negligence Law
Some conditions have very similar symptoms or very broad, vague symptoms and can be notoriously hard to diagnose, and nobody wants doctors to be afraid of doing what they can to help get to the bottom of what a patient is potentially suffering from for fear of lawsuits against them. However, where resources are stretched, or standards are not high enough, cases like those described here put people in harm’s way. It is important that people who are the victims of medical negligence do come forward with the help of the best medical negligence solicitors, so that accurate data can be gathered on how frequently these issues occur, and things can be done from a regulatory perspective to improve healthcare over all.
If you are concerned that a diagnosis you received was related to medical negligence for any of the reasons we have talked about here, your best first step is to talk to a lawyer in the field.
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