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Pediatric Medical Malpractice: Every Mother's Worst Fear

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No mother wants to see her child suffer. It's a tragic, heartbreaking event when a mother sees her child in pain and doesn't have the power to help. While this is devastating, imagine the medical staff that you trust being the reason for your child's pain.

It's not uncommon for medical staff to:

  • Misdiagnose a condition

  • Administer medication improperly

"A new study found in the journal Pediatrics reports that pediatric patients experience medication errors every eight minutes in the U.S. This type of medical error reaches an average of almost 65,000 children every year," reports https://ankinlaw.com/.

If pediatric medical malpractice occurs to your child, you need to know your rights.

What to Do If Your Child Suffers from Medical Malpractice

If your child suffers from medical malpractice, you have a right to seek compensation. Your first point of contact should be a qualified lawyer. You need to make sure that a few things are taken care of, such as:

  • Your child's medical care

  • The protection of your child's rights

Medical professionals, no matter how nice or apologetic they may be, must be held accountable for their actions. If the error of medical personnel led to your child suffering, you need to hold them accountable.

There is a medical standard of care.

What this standard of care means is very important to your case. When a person is in the hospital or seeking the help of a medical professional, they can expect a standard of care. This means that:

  • A standard level of skill is provided

  • A standard level of attention is given

You'll need to prove that someone with similar training as your health care professional would have provided your child with a different standard of care. The accepted practices or course of treatment should be given.

If an error occurred during this standard of care, then negligence needs to be proven.

Medical negligence will be the next thing that your lawyer will try to prove. This area focuses on proving that the standard of care was breached in some way. In essence, it's up to your lawyer to be able to determine how the medical professional failed to meet the standard of care.

This is where the error occurred.

Medical experts are often brought into the case to help determine the case of the injuries. These professionals have intimate knowledge of the procedures that were or were supposed to be provided.

Experts will walk the journey through the entire medical condition and diagnosis. Treatment and what the doctor did will be discussed, too.

Even if your doctor did make a mistake, there needs to be a link that proves that the error had a lasting impact of some sort. That is, if the doctor failed to diagnose a condition that is untreatable, it would be difficult to prove that the actions that the doctor took or didn't take led to the condition progressing.

The plaintiff, in this case your child, must have had a measure of harm for your medical malpractice case to be valid.

Expect medical malpractice to be a long and tedious process.

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