The impending birth of a child is an emotional event that focuses on one thing: a safe birth and a healthy baby. We put ourselves and our trust in the hands of healthcare professionals, and we depend upon them to perform their jobs professionally, and according to safe guidelines. But what happens when it goes wrong and your baby is injured at birth? How do you determine if it was medical malpractice? Do you have the right to sue the hospital or practitioner for damages?
If your baby has sustained an injury at birth, you need to contact a law firm experienced in malpractice suits immediately. The time you have to file a claim is limited and you could lose your right to sue for damages. A reputable law firm can quickly establish the facts and advise you how to best proceed.
When the birth injury could have been avoided, malpractice is often suspected. It can occur during prenatal care or during and even after delivery. Not all birth injuries are due to malpractice, and determining cause takes the teamwork of a skilled attorney and a medical experts who will carefully review every detail of what occurred in a thorough investigation.
Some Common Causes of Baby Injury Malpractice Scenarios
- Failure of the medical professional to recognize or assess prenatal disorders or adverse health in either the fetus or the mother that, if handled, would have prevented injury at birth.
- Misprescribing or wrongly administering drugs, anesthetics or medications.
- Correctly prescribing drugs, but failing to note the presence of dangerous side effects.
- Improper use of medical devices during delivery.
- Failure to modify delivery procedures when urgent situations arose that demanded these procedures.
- Inattentiveness to the conditions or responses of the patient or baby.
- Failure to read and act upon existing medical reports.
Attributing the Birth Injury to Medical Malpractice
There are many baby injuries that could have been due to a birth defect that no amount of medical skill could have predicted or prevented. This is another reason you need an attorney skilled at knowing what records to review, and exactly where to find the pertinent facts. Some injuries can have a single cause but the reason for the injury could vary. Avoidable oxygen insufficiency during birth could cause cerebral palsy but cerebral palsy could can also result from a lack of oxygen due to a genetic birth defect.
Medical Malpractice Birth Injury: Who Gets Sued?
Your attorney and the medical investigators we use on your case case will investigate how the patient was handled, and compare these actions against standards of good practice. This not only identifies what went wrong, but also attaches responsibility to one or more people who acted improperly. Your birth injury lawsuit may name not only the doctor in charge (who should have caught the negligence) but also the hospital where the delivery took place, nurses in attendance, any anesthesiologist present during the birth, drug companies who failed to adequately inform doctors of drug side effects, or any hospital staff who had vital information they failed to pass on, and as a result of this failure, an injury occurred.
Our medical malpractice attorneys at The Hershewe Law Firm have been handling malpractice cases for over thirty years. All licenses medical practitioners are backed with malpractice insurance, and regardless of how the practitioners feel about the birth injury, their insurance company will often seek to aggressively reduce the grounds for a claim, or attempt you to settle for far less than the situation warrants. Call us now to set up your free consultation at 417-999-9999.