A list of  the most common Medical Malpractice Claims

With all of today’s advanced technology, negligence and medical malpractice situations unfortunately still occur. Sometimes it’s due to a hospital being overfull, and the staff is overworked, and sometimes it’s because someone just wasn’t paying attention like they should have been. While it’s true that most doctors and nurses do their best providing care to their patients, deadly or life-altering mistakes are still possible, which is why we have medical malpractice claims. Here is a list of a few of the most common medical malpractice claims:

Misdiagnosis or Delayed Diagnosis

These are common claims due to the fact that there are some diseases out there that can be difficult to identify, as well as the fact that some ailments hide behind others. The most prevalent misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis claims that arise most often are in regard to cancer in adults, and meningitis in children. Furthermore, situations where someone comes to a hospital, and then is discharged, only to have recurrent and even fatal symptoms, are common malpractice claims.

Medication Errors

Another common medical malpractice claim is mistakes made in prescribing or administering prescription drugs. This particular error always turns out to be a major problem. While most of these errors occur in patients over the age of 60, it happens to those in other age groups as well. These mistakes are generally made when a doctor or nurse fails to properly review the patient’s medical history and prescribes a drug that works detrimentally against another prescription the patient is taking, or mistakenly prescribes the wrong drug.

Surgery Errors

Unfortunately, surgery errors are another all-too-common medical malpractice claim always showing up on the reports. While a majority of these particular claims reported are non-life-threatening issues, like accidental nerve damage, and leaving a foreign object, like a medical sponge, inside the body, there are other, much more serious problems. Sometimes these claims are made against surgeons due to an inability to control bleeding, and there are situations where surgeons have operated on the wrong body part or even the wrong patient. These types of errors are always due to very poor or missed communication.