When we talk about hospital legal cases, we’re usually looking at personal injury cases that come from injuries a patient has suffered. Most of the time, these injuries happen because of negligence. This is when someone doesn’t use basic care and it ends up causing damage or injury to another person. Legal cases against hospitals can include all sorts of legal claims and theories in addition to negligence.
Most cases involving hospitals are connected to some type of medical malpractice. Medical malpractice is what happens when a healthcare professional is negligent and their negligence injures a patient they have a professional relationship with, either currently or in the past. Under something called the corporate negligence doctrine, the hospital itself can be held responsible for a mistake that a doctor or other staff member makes while working for them. Under this theory, the hospital may end up being liable even when their employee was working on their own. These cases might also be related to hospital-wide policies that don’t meet state medical standards. When we’re talking about medical malpractice liability, more than one party can be involved. The liability could be split between a doctor and a nurse whose negligence caused the patient’s injury. Depending on the circumstances, hospital cases might include a large number of patients who were all affected by the same negligence. At that point the claim would become a class action lawsuit.
These cases can grow beyond single incidents pretty fast. Hospital policies affect every single patient who comes through their doors. When system-wide problems start showing up, the financial and legal consequences get multiplied across dozens or even hundreds of families who’ve been affected.
Hospital legal cases are different from malpractice cases against a single doctor because the process of suing a corporation is different than suing a person. Like when you start a lawsuit against a person, you can usually serve them directly with your lawsuit papers. But when you’re starting a lawsuit against a corporation or hospital, then you’ll need to find their registered agent first and then serve that person with the lawsuit. The whole process tends to have more steps than most people expect.
What Are Some Examples of a Hospital Lawsuit?
People file legal claims against hospitals for all kinds of different reasons. As mentioned earlier, negligence and malpractice are the two most common reasons you’ll see. Some of these cases could be for small problems that happened but others are for much bigger problems that affected people. The size and seriousness of these cases can be very different. Since it’s the hospital itself that gets sued, there’s a real chance that more than one person got hurt.
Emergency room malpractice cases, or situations where hospitals refuse to admit or treat a patient without following the right process for saying no, are common. Sometimes, they violate patient privacy rights and someone gets hurt in a slip and fall accident. Administrative errors happen as well as disputes about insurance coverage.
Each type of case comes with its own legal challenges for patients and hospitals alike. Emergency room cases usually come down to decisions that doctors had to make in just a few seconds under extreme pressure. When privacy gets violated, it can affect hundreds of patients all at once.
Sometimes hospitals don’t make sure that their staff have the right licenses, training, and education they need. They might not have enough staff working to take care of patients and they lose or mishandle or illegally share confidential patient records.
There’s times when a nurse or technician gives a patient the wrong medication or gives them too much or too little. Someone might leave an object inside the patient’s body after surgery. Staff don’t always treat or dress wounds correctly and sometimes they ignore the basic standards of medical care.
The hospital has to take responsibility for what its employees do, even if the hospital administrators weren’t directly part of what happened. When surgical instruments get left inside someone, that person needs another operation just to get them out. Your recovery gets much harder when the staff aren’t following the right procedures for taking care of wounds.
Because hospitals have their own dangers, the injuries that cause people to sue hospitals usually include different areas of the law all at once. Every state has its own laws about medical malpractice and each state has different requirements for how you file a lawsuit against a hospital.
How Do You Know if the Doctor or Hospital Is Responsible?
Some doctors work for the hospital as employees but plenty of them are actually independent contractors from a legal standpoint. You’ll see this all the time with surgeons and specialists. What happens is that if a patient gets hurt while they’re under the doctor’s care at the hospital, the hospital isn’t legally responsible for what happened. The doctor is the one who’s responsible. So if you get injured, you probably won’t be able to sue the hospital successfully. You’d need to sue the doctor instead.
When doctors work as contractors like this, it gives you all kinds of legal problems for patients who get hurt. Hospitals can pretty much wash their hands of any mistakes their doctors make, even though the hospital has the rooms and equipment. Your whole case could fall apart if you sue the hospital when you actually should have gone after the particular doctor.
Now, if the person who was careless is an employee of the hospital, then the hospital itself will usually be responsible if that employee hurts someone because of their carelessness or mistakes. Nurses, medical technicians, and support staff are almost always hospital employees. If these employees were doing their usual job duties when they caused the patient’s injury, the hospital is probably responsible. But this might not be true if the employee made the mistake while a doctor was supervising them.
When doctors supervise hospital staff, it makes the whole liability question very messy. Let’s say a nurse makes an error. You might think the hospital would be responsible. But if a doctor was overseeing what the nurse was doing, the blame might change. To know who’s actually responsible, you need to dig deep into who was making which decisions at each step.
Every case has its own different circumstances. What’s more, it can be very hard to tell who’s actually at fault. An attorney helps you’ve figured out how to move forward and who you should hold responsible. They do this through discovery which is a legal process where they investigate and get together information about possible claims.
What Kind of Compensation Can You Receive from a Hospital Lawsuit?
Hospital legal cases usually result in a monetary award. This money is meant to help pay the patient back for what they lost because of their injury. This award might cover hospital bills, medical therapy, medicine costs, and insurance fees. It might also cover other losses like lost wages, especially if the injury caused them to lose their job. Medical bills can become too much to manage when you’re going through long periods of treatment.
The money you get from these cases helps you recover in more ways than just physically. Patients run into more costs for care, rehab, and medicines while they’re usually making less money than before. The monetary award helps their finances during a time when their normal life has been turned upside down.
When cases are won, there are other results too. The hospital and its staff may have to review and change their procedures and policies. If there’s a big class action lawsuit, it could cause investigations into the hospital’s general safety. These investigations can go on for a few years. You might also see product recalls if the lawsuit involved defective drugs or medical devices.
What Kind of Defenses are Available for a Hospital in a Lawsuit?
In addition to hospitals saying that the doctor who performed your procedure was a contractor and not an employee, there are a few other defenses that hospitals normally use when someone sues them. Most hospitals will actually use a few different defense strategies at the same time. Some of the most common ones you’ll see are contributory negligence, where they claim that you somehow contributed to your own injury. They’ll also use the statute of limitations defense, arguing that too much time has passed since the injury happened. And then there’s the argument that there’s no causation. They’ll say that the patient wasn’t actually hurt by the doctor’s mistake or that the doctor’s actions didn’t actually cause the injuries.
When hospitals use contributory negligence as a defense, they’ll look at every single thing you did. Their defense teams will go through every choice you made before, during, and after your treatment to try to find ways that you might have made your condition worse. How well you followed your discharge instructions turns into evidence they can use in court. Even small facts like not taking your medicine as prescribed can hurt your case.
The timing of when you file your lawsuit matters quite a bit with statute of limitations defenses. Every state has its own deadline for when you can file a medical malpractice lawsuit. These deadlines may start from when you first found out about the injury or when it actually happened. If you miss these deadlines, then your case is over no matter how strong your evidence could be.
When hospitals challenge causation, you have to prove that there’s a direct link between what the doctor did wrong and your injuries. Hospitals will try to argue that your injuries came from pre-existing conditions, other treatments you had, or just the natural way your illness would have progressed anyway. If you have a long medical history, these defenses work against patients who can’t show a direct timeline between their treatment and the problems that came after.
Do I Need to Hire a Lawyer to Sue a Hospital?
If you were injured while you were receiving treatment or care at a hospital, you should talk to a personal injury attorney who knows what they’re doing. Using LegalMatch can help you find the right attorney for your needs.
There could be different parties who are responsible for your injury. It could be the hospital itself, or it could be doctors, nurses, or even the manufacturers that make medical equipment and each of these defendants has their own insurance company and they all work under different laws and laws. To find every possible source of compensation, you need someone to conduct an investigation while the evidence is still fresh and witnesses still remember what happened.
An attorney can also figure out if you have a case and what your best legal strategy should be. They’ll also be able to work out a settlement for you and, if you need to go to court, they’ll represent you there as well.
Insurance carriers always put together dedicated teams to defend these hospital injury claims and try to pay out as little as possible. Your attorney can go toe-to-toe with them by working with medical experts who can show just where the treatment you received wasn’t enough. The legal process will move forward step by step while you concentrate on better and putting your life back together after what happened.
Medical malpractice laws have strict deadlines that are different in each state and depend on your claim. If you miss these deadlines, you could lose your right to any compensation at all. Your attorney needs enough time to build the strongest case possible.
