Medical Negligence Lawyer – Hazleton, PA

Medical negligence is unfortunately always possible when doctors and nurses treat patients. While it’s true that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, healthcare providers can’t afford to botch the treatment of a patient, since errors in medical care can lead to permanent injury and even death.

At Latona Law, we view medical negligence as simply unacceptable. If you entrust your health to the service of a doctor, nurse, surgeon, or another provider, you expect a reasonable level of care in return. Medical negligence isn’t the failure of a treatment or procedure. It is a careless mistake made by a doctor that a more competent, diligent doctor would not have made. Patients who are injured by medical negligence deserve restitution. If you need a medical negligence lawyer in Hazleton, PA, Latona Law wants to help you.

Types of Medical Negligence

Negligence in medicine can take many forms, from delayed diagnoses to poor decision-making, to simple inaction on the part of doctors and nurses. For a decision to be considered medical negligence in court, the patient has to have been injured in a significant way, and that injury has to have been preventable. To help you better understand medical negligence and the types of problems it can cause, we’d like to identify a few examples of injuries that a court could determine resulted from malpractice.

• Birth injuries. Doctors who are caring for pregnant women are also caring for the children inside of them. This makes it incumbent upon the doctors to ensure they are making the right decisions at all times. Any negligent action or inaction could lead to the child becoming injured before, during, or after birth. Perhaps a doctor failed to anticipate a problem that became apparent only during the birth itself or used an instrument incorrectly and injured the baby as a result. Birth injuries may include brain damage (possibly leading to cerebral palsy), Erb’s palsy, and malformation of various body parts, such as the spinal cord. Courts will look at whether the doctor could have prevented the injury or should have known better.
• Surgical injuries. Risks are always possible anytime someone has surgery, but surgeons must be able to handle unanticipated complications that can arise and cause the patient to sustain a new injury. Surgeons who make bad decisions that more competent surgeons would not have made could be guilty of malpractice. Common types of surgical injuries include the surgeon striking a vital organ by mistake and leaving medical tools inside the patient’s body.
• Misdiagnoses. One of the most important factors in diagnosing diseases is being able to identify conditions soon enough so patients have time to seek adequate treatment. If a court finds that the treating doctor did not diagnose a potentially fatal illness, but should have been able to (given that other doctors in the same field could have diagnosed it properly), an instance of malpractice may be determined.)