You trust that your doctor and other health care professionals responsible for your care have your best interests in mind. When those doctors, nurses, and other professional betray your trust by providing substandard care, you can be left with debilitating injuries.
At Eisbrouch Marsh, we know that a financial award can never compensate you for all that you have lost, but we can help you seek justice by holding the responsible parties accountable for your injuries.
Call us at 201-342-5545 today for your free legal case consultation.
Malpractice is not about an unhappy medical outcome. Medical malpractice is about the medical professionals you trusted not providing the level of care that you deserved.
Types of Medical Malpractice
Some of the most common forms of medical malpractice involve:
- Doctor Negligence
- Misdiagnosis and Failure to Diagnose
- Hospital Negligence
- Surgical Errors
- Pharmacy Errors
Compensation Available in Malpractice Cases
The injuries sustained because of medical errors are often severe and long lasting. They can result in the need for costly medical treatment and life-long care. Depending on your specific case, we seek compensation for:
- Actual Damages: Actual damages are comprised of the quantifiable amount of money you had to spend due to your accident. This includes medical bills, lost wages, and lost future earnings.
- General Damages: General damages are those that are not easily quantifiable and will require additional evidence or testimony detailing the severity of your injuries. This could include emotional distress or mental anguish. These damages could be significantly high if your injuries are exceptionally severe or you are left permanently disabled. General damages may also include compensation for loss of consortium, which is designed to help remedy the loss of relationship or marital relations experienced by spouses in the event one is rendered disabled.
- Punitive Damages: While not available in every situation, New Jersey law supports the notion of assessing extra damages against a defendant who acted grossly negligent or intentionally.
- Wrongful Death: If your loved one was killed because of medical malpractice, New Jersey law allows for recovery by the decedent’s estate on behalf of the victim’s immediate family. If you are facing this difficult situation, we can help you navigate the process of a wrongful death lawsuit and begin your family’s healing process.
Doctor Negligence
Sadly, many malpractice cases can be traced back to preventable errors made by medical practitioners due to factors such as:
- Lack of sleep. Many doctors work long hours on little sleep which can seriously affect their reaction time and logical reasoning skills.
- Over-treating patients. Sometimes labeled “defensive medicine,” doctors who order medically unnecessary tests run the risk of creating false positives, needless operations, and overly medicating their patients.
- Time constraints. When doctors spend more time on administrative tasks and paperwork, they have less time for actual patient interactions. This can lead to gaps in patient medical history or errors made during rushed examinations.
- Drug and alcohol abuse. Like the general population, doctors are not immune to addiction. However, their life choices can adversely affect all of the patients in their care.
At Eisbrouch Marsh, we can help you hold the doctor responsible for their mistakes.
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Misdiagnosis and Failure to Diagnose
Having your condition misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all can have severe and deadly consequences because necessary treatment is delayed or never given.
Common misdiagnosis errors include:
- Misdiagnosis of cancer
- Heart attack misdiagnosis
- Stroke misdiagnosis
- Failure to detect the signs of heart attack or stroke
- Rheumatoid arthritis misdiagnosis
- Multiple Sclerosis misdiagnosis
- Parkinson’s Disease
- Failure to recognize internal bleeding
- Failure to diagnose diabetes
- Failure to diagnose meningitis or appendicitis in children
- Failure to diagnose ectopic pregnancy
Unfortunately, death is the most common consequence of a misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose a stroke, heart attack or cancer. In these cases, the family may be able to pursue a wrongful death action to hold the responsible parties accountable.
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Hospital Negligence
Hospital negligence happens any time less-than-reasonable medical care delivered in a hospital setting results in a patient’s injuries or even death. It is estimated that more than 250,000 people die each year because of medical errors. It is the third leading cause of death in the United States, only heart disease and cancer claim more lives.
When you are admitted to the hospital, you want to trust that the facility and its staff adhere to the patient safety accrediting standards for administering medication, equipment, and staffing. However, the hundreds of thousands of people injured in hospital malpractice cases know too well that hospital negligence comes in many forms:
- Birth injuries, including those that involve forceps, cerebral palsy, and brain damage
- Anesthesia mistakes
- Emergency room errors
- Surgical error
- Delays in or failure to diagnose a medical condition
- Negligent testing
- Medication errors
- Hospital acquired infection
- Injury from delayed surgery
- Improper consent to a medical procedure or surgery
- Misdiagnosis
A hospital can be held responsible for negligence when a medical employee of the hospital, such as a nurse, technician, paramedic, or in some cases a doctor (if it can be determined that the doctor is in fact an employee of the hospital) makes an error that falls below the standard of care that they owe you.
In some cases when a hospital employee commits malpractice while under a doctor’s supervision, the doctor (not the hospital, in a case in which the doctor is not an employee of the hospital) may be held liable. Determining whether the employee was under a doctor’s supervision at the time of making the mistake will depend on whether the doctor was present and whether the doctor had the ability to prevent the employee’s negligence.
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Surgical Errors
Each day, thousands of patients elect to undergo surgical procedures without excessive concern about errors that may occur once they are in the operating room. No matter if the surgery is medically necessary or elective in nature, patients everywhere put their full faith in the competence and skill of the professionals treating them.
If you or your loved one has suffered harm due to surgical errors, it’s important to know that you do not have to struggle through your legal case alone. The attorneys at Eisbrouch Marsh are here to help you make sense of the situation and seek justice from those who have harmed you. We offer the type of personalized, comprehensive legal representation that allows you to begin the healing process.
We know first-hand the emotional and physical devastation a surgical mistake can have on patients and their entire families, and we possess the tools and the resources needed to hold responsible parties fully accountable.
Surgical mistakes that cause severe injuries include:
- Leaving objects, such as surgical tools, inside the body
- Surgical slips or mishaps that cause muscle, nerve, or vital organ damage
- Anesthesia mistakes that lead to coma, incapacitation, or death
- Surgery performed on the wrong part of the patient’s body, often called wrong site surgery
- A procedure undertaken on the wrong patient
- Operations that exceed the scope of the patient’s consent
The reasons underlying these and other surgical errors are numerous, but all of them ought to be preventable. Fatigue, inattention, poor communication, faulty planning, lack of adequate staffing and failure to get complete patient medical histories can all lead to serious, costly injuries.
Some of the common injuries that stem from surgical mistakes include:
- Infectious disease transmission
- Systemic infection
- Lasting disfigurement
- Permanent nerve damage
- Damage to vital organs
- Internal hemorrhaging
- Unsuccessful procedures requiring revision surgery
- Death
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Pharmacy Errors
Many patients feel a sense of relief when they are released from the hospital or from a doctor’s visit with a prescription and some doctor’s orders for self-care at home. However, for some patients the pharmacy is where a life-threatening mistake happens.
Common pharmacy errors that can lead to serious injury include:
- Wrong dosing instructions
- Mislabeling or providing the wrong medication
- Failing to dispense information about drug interactions and side effects
- Misreading the doctor’s original prescription
Work conditions such as high numbers of incoming prescriptions, constant interruptions, and similar-sounding drug names can all conspire to make these sorts of “mechanical” pharmacy errors understandable, but nonetheless still dangerous to the patients who are trusting the pharmacist to properly dispense their medications.
Often, the elderly population is most susceptible to pharmacy negligence, since older Americans are more likely to be taking more medications and tend to be more vulnerable.
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Call Eisbrouch Marsh Today
When you or your loved one has suffered injuries at the hands of a medical practitioner that you trusted, you can count on Eisbrouch Marsh to help you pursue justice through a medical malpractice case. Call us today at 201-342-5545 for your free medical malpractice consultation.
With offices in Hackensack, Newark, and New York, our lawyers welcome clients from Bergen County, Essex County and all nearby areas in New Jersey.
