Do we have a leg to stand on RE: Malpractise?!
Question: My mother is 52 and suffered chronic back pain for 12 years due to deterioration of her nerves, muscles and bones and osteo-arthritis. she has never has a specialist examine her or give her a complete scan to locate the source of the problem. The GP just prescribes pain killers, to which she has become addicted and ruined her internal organs after needing to take them every 4 hours for the last decade.
8 days ago she took a very bad fall. We took her to emergency and she was admitted to hospital. The nursing staff did not give her pain relief on time, and wrote in her file that she sleeps well and has good mobility, even after the doctor said she suspects a fracture and mom had not slept in 3 days. The nurses were cruel with their lifting techniques and caused her alot of discomfort and when she asked for pain killers they told her to "stop asking for drugs and to deal with it"
its been 5 days since we took her home to care for her because the nurses were being awful.
Answers: My mother is 52 and suffered chronic back pain for 12 years due to deterioration of her nerves, muscles and bones and osteo-arthritis. she has never has a specialist examine her or give her a complete scan to locate the source of the problem. The GP just prescribes pain killers, to which she has become addicted and ruined her internal organs after needing to take them every 4 hours for the last decade.
8 days ago she took a very bad fall. We took her to emergency and she was admitted to hospital. The nursing staff did not give her pain relief on time, and wrote in her file that she sleeps well and has good mobility, even after the doctor said she suspects a fracture and mom had not slept in 3 days. The nurses were cruel with their lifting techniques and caused her alot of discomfort and when she asked for pain killers they told her to "stop asking for drugs and to deal with it"
its been 5 days since we took her home to care for her because the nurses were being awful.
You can sue whoever you want for any reason or no reason, it's America, and we all (unfortunately) have that right, so the question is whether you have a good case.
If you want to win a medical malpractice lawsuit, there are 2 things that must be proven, that a mistake was made and that it harmed the patient, and it does not, based only on what you've said here, sound like you have a particularly strong case.
First off, the doctor is not responsible for the nursing care, which sounds to have been very poor, but you would have to prove that it actually hurt her (and getting pain meds late is not really harm, though it can certainly cause suffering). If the doctor did miss a fracture, then you're going to have to show that some irrovecable harm happened and that he should have been able to make the diagnosis (of course, first you have to show that she actually has a fracture) - which is going to be rather difficult since unless she has some neurological damage, all it really did is delay treatment, which is a shame, and should not happen, but doctors are not perfect either, we don't always immediately get the right diagnosis, and that's to be expected.
I think you should definately complain to the hospital about the poor nursing care (although nurses are very hard to fire these days because there aren't enough to go around, they're incredibly difficult to replace) but I think that a lawsuit would be a uphill slog, unlikely to reward you and just cause misery all around.