Malpractice Cases Involving Infection

29 January 2015 by Jonathan Phillips

There are several ways you can suffer from an infection acquired in a hospital, that can be the result of negligence of the doctor or the hospital. Infections can be bacterial, fungal or viral, and they can do serious damage to your health and lower the chances of your full recovery. There are, however, some things you should know about a case like this.

Difficulties Presented By Malpractice Cases

Malpractice by means of infection can happen following a surgery. but it is a hard case to prove for a couple of reasons. Even though hospitals usually have high standards of cleanliness and sterility, they are, after all, places where lots of sick people are and disease can spread naturally.

The second thing is, your skin is a natural protective layer to your body to prevent infections from entering it. Surgery gives germs a route to get inside. Also, your immune system may not be working optimally due to the trauma or for other reasons.

Generally, you have to prove there was negligence in some aspect of care by one of the doctors, the hospital, or other medical care provider.

Improper Sanitary Procedure During Surgery

There are two ways infection can be caused by the negligence of a doctor or a hospital. The first is that the surgeon or their assistants did not follow reasonable and proper sanitary procedures and unwittingly introduced infection into your body during the surgery.

Post-operative Treatment and Environment

The hospital itself could be liable If staff were not following reasonable standards of cleanliness and care, or that some aspect of the hospital environment is unsafe, so an infection was introduced while you before or after surgery while you were recovering. Environmental Conditions include the general cleanliness of the hospital, and also things like disease being spread through an unsafe ventilation system.

You would have to show that if the hospital were doing things differently, your infection would not have occurred.

Failure to Diagnose

When you are getting follow-up care, if your doctor fails to observe signs of infection and prescribe treatment for it, he or she would be negligent. You would need to show that most doctors would have picked up on the signs and symptoms you were presenting at a certain point in your care, and your doctor did not, and this caused you undue harm as a result.

Legal Representation

This kind of case may be costly to prove and you will need to hire an attorney that is experienced in these kind of cases. Your lawyer would need to find experts in various areas to give their professional opinions that reasonable standards were not followed, and your infection could have been prevented. Also, that you suffered significant problems directly due to this negligence.

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