What Is Hospital Negligence?

Medical professionals and facilities must follow a standard of care when treating patients. This standard is how other doctors in that field, such as pediatrics or cardiology, would treat a patient under the same or similar circumstances. It’s an accepted protocol for examining, diagnosing, and treating patients given their medical condition or disease.

Hospital negligence occurs when a hospital employee fails to adhere to that standard of care, whether it’s an ER physician, surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurse, nursing assistant, pharmacist, or another staff member. The hospital, as their employer, is ultimately responsible for their conduct.

Failure to Maintain Safety & Quality

Hospitals are required to establish policies and procedures to ensure patient safety. While it might never be possible to eliminate all adverse events.

According to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), “hospitals must create and maintain a culture of safety and quality throughout the hospital.” When they fail to maintain that culture of safety and someone is injured as a result, the Hospital might be negligent and is responsible for the injuries that occur.

How Common is Hospital Negligence?

It’s difficult to calculate how often hospital negligence happens and how often it causes someone harm.

We know more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die each year due to medical errors. Medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death and in all likelihood, cause many more non-fatal injuries.

Hospital negligence can involve:

  • Misdiagnosis, failure to diagnose, and delayed diagnosis
  • Improper and delayed treatments
  • Surgical mistakes
  • Anesthesia mistakes
  • Prescription and drug administration mistakes
  • Hospital-acquired infections
  • Inadequate monitoring
  • Failure to properly document
  • Failure to properly sterilize or prevent infections
  • Not properly communicating with a patient
  • Assaulting a patient by staff

Settlements for Hospital Negligence

Our hospital negligence lawyers in Lancaster have years of experience helping individuals and families who’ve suffered from substandard care in emergency rooms and hospitals. We know how to evaluate and build these cases, and, most importantly, we know how to fight for fair settlement agreements.

We believe our purpose is more significant than fighting for just one person’s compensation. Each Lancaster medical malpractice claim we bring pushes the medical community to do better and maintain high standards. Since we prepare these cases for court from the very beginning, we are fighting to make hospitals safer for everyone.

Do You Have a Hospital Negligence Case?

It can be difficult to determine if you have a medical malpractice case after you have been injured at a hospital. Medical care can cause side effects and complications even if hospital employees perform their duties well. It helps to talk with an attorney who can connect you with a highly respected medical expert.

Our hospital neglect lawyers work with medical experts in virtually every field of medicine to define the standard of care and determine how a hospital employee’s conduct deviated from that standard.

Your injury may be due to one medical professional’s carelessness or hospital-wide neglect, such as a lack of cleanliness that led to infections. It may also be the case that a hospital’s failure to implement policies and procedures to guide their employees’ conduct caused your injury.

Contact a Hospital Injury Lawyer For Help

You deserve experienced and skilled legal representation after suffering from negligent care at a hospital. Contact our Lancaster County hospital negligence attorneys right away. Our attorneys have years of experience helping individuals hold hospitals responsible for the harm they cause and will demand you receive fair compensation.

Call Atlee Hall today at (717) 393-9596 or use our online contact form to reach out for a free consultation.