Charlottesville Urgent Care Malpractice Attorney
In the twentieth century, there were almost no urgent care facilities in Virginia. Today, emergency clinics are a vital part of the state’s healthcare infrastructure. These small facilities obviously do not have the same resources as a large hospital. Nevertheless, patients have an absolute right to expect the same quality of care from these facilities. Anything less could be negligent.
The compassionate Charlottesville urgent care malpractice attorneys at MichieHamlett understand the intense pain and suffering that urgent care provider negligence causes. So, we work hard to obtain maximum compensation for these victims. This compensation usually includes money for economic losses, such as medical bills, and noneconomic losses, such as pain and suffering. Additional punitive damages are often available as well.
Misdiagnosis Errors
Frequently, urgent care professionals can only use the information available on a medical intranet when they diagnose patients. As a result, the misdiagnosis percentage is rather high at urgent care clinics. That’s especially true since many of these doctors and nurses are used to treating cuts and other trauma injuries. They are not used to diagnosing and treating things like:
- Cancer: The intense pain that many cancer patients suffer often drives them to urgent care clinics. Unless the patient has a family history of this disease or displays some obvious risk factors, many doctors dismiss cancer almost out of hand.
- Head Injuries: Although head wounds are usually trauma injuries, these victims usually have varying symptoms. Therefore, the medical staff might treat the external injuries and ignore the internal brain injury. Since these patients might not get the treatment they need, their conditions deteriorate.
- Heart Disease: Much like cancer, many doctors consider heart disease to be a genetic or lifestyle condition. Furthermore, much like head injuries, many patients do not have signature symptoms. For example, some women do not have severe chest pains when they have heart attacks.
The survival and recovery rates for chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer have increased significantly since the 1990s. However, a prompt and proper diagnosis is necessary to take advantage of these improvements. Otherwise, the patient’s prognosis could be dim indeed.
Surgical Mistakes
A surgical mistake could occur before, during, or after the procedure, especially in a compressed urgent care setting.
Some doctors do not fully go over a patient’s medical history. As a result, emergency surgery might do more harm than good. Other doctors fail to obtain informed consent for each aspect of the surgical procedure. Instead, they simply have patients sign waivers which they might not fully understand.
A thirty second team meeting before a procedure avoids errors like performing the wrong kind of surgery. A thirty second instrument count near the end avoids errors like leaving devices inside a patient’s body. Yet despite their high level of legal responsibility, many doctors do not take these simple precautions.
During surgical recovery, infections are a serious problem. Generally, recovery areas are not as sterile as operating areas. And, fresh surgical wounds are easily infected. These infections are often life threatening, especially if the patient has a certain pre-existing condition.
Reach Out to a Hard-Working Attorney
Doctors in small clinics have the same duty of care as doctors in big hospitals. For a free consultation with an experienced urgent care malpractice lawyer in Charlottesville, contact MichieHamlett. You have a limited amount of time to act.
