Ask a Medical Malpractice (Defense) Lawyer

[TheRealJoeFish]

What would you say the ratio is between bullshit malpractice suits and legitimate malpractice? Do you usually know when you're defending someone/a hospital that's guilty as hell?

Medmal cases are usually very expensive to bring and defend.  A benefit of this is that there are fewer silly or frivolous cases filed in the medical malpractice field that in other areas of law.  Maybe only 1 in 10 cases is the sort where you look at it and think "they shouldn't have filed that, they've got no chance."  That's not to say that every other case is ultimately meritorious - of the ones that go to trial, between 60% and 80% end in defense verdicts - but those are the sort where there could be room to disagree over whether the care was reasonable, and in those cases a lot depends on what the doctors/nurses knew at what time, what was communicated to whom, and the other very technical facts of dealing with the human body.  Everyone on both sides of every case knows that, sometimes, in a hospital, you can do everything right and the patient still has a negative outcome.  The doctor/nurse explains to the jury what they did and why, experts provide the jury with info to help them decide if what the doctor/nurse did was reasonable, and the jury tries to look at the situation and say "did the doctor's actions meet the professional standards we expect of doctors?" or whatnot.

Part of the reason there's such a high rate of defense verdicts is because the cases where someone clearly goofed up are settled pretty quickly, so they never get to trial.  It's pretty easy to tell when someone's obviously messed up, because it's right there in the medical record: "nurse so and so informed the doctor that the wrong drug was administered" or something.  In those cases, the only hang-up would be what the damages are.  I don't view my job in such cases as "trying to get the doctor/nurse/hospital off the hook," rather, it's trying to facilitate a resolution of the claim that gets money into the hands of an injured person who deserves it quickly and easily while protecting the health provider's interests and letting them get back to helping people.  That is, trying to be fair to both sides.

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So what do you think of this?

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots...cal-errors

Medical Errors Are No. 3 Cause Of U.S Deaths, Researchers Say

I think the health system could be wayyy better. 

I think that doctors and nurses and medical professionals have a very difficult task, because in a world where "everyone makes mistakes," they (along with airline pilots and a handful of other people) are in a position where "mistake = someone dies (or is badly hurt)."  The vast number of people who need serious medical care, combined with the fact that the people administering that care are people, means that there will always be a significant number of deaths and injuries caused by medical errors.

That's why we need to 1) try to make the medical system better in any way possible (because the stakes are so high) and 2) ensure that there's always a system, whatever that may be, for determining which deaths and injuries are caused by medical errors and compensating people and their families for those errors.