When you suffer injuries as a result of a hospital visit, or if your condition worsens because of a delayed or wrong diagnosis, it is likely that you will feel that you have been failed by your medical practitioners. As a patient in a hospital, you depend on your physicians to an extremely high degree, and it follows that they have a legal duty to provide you with the best possible care.
If you believe that you have unnecessarily suffered at the hands of your doctors and surgeons, it is important to understand how the law works to protect you in this situation. In order to take legal action and successfully make a medical malpractice claim in the state of Illinois, you must adequately show that a doctor, surgeon or hospital acted negligently.
How can negligence be proven in a medical malpractice case?
In order to show that negligence was present in your medical situation, several elements need to be present. First of all, it must be shown that you were owed a duty from either the medical practitioner in question or from the entity, for example, the hospital.
It should then be shown that this duty was breached. For example, a surgeon has the duty to provide you with the best possible care and competency. In a negligence case, some evidence should be present to show that the surgeon breached their duty of care or that they were incompetent in some way.
If a duty was breached, however, but it did not lead to any damages, a legal case would not be appropriate. To be successful in a medical malpractice case in the state of Illinois, you should also be able to show that the breach of duty caused the damages that you suffered. In other words, you should be able to show that if the surgeon did not breach his or her duty, you would not have suffered.
If you have suffered because of what you believe to be a breach of duty in a medical environment, it is a good idea to consider the type of negligence that was present and consider taking action to recoup damages.