When you visit a medical practitioner for a health check-up or another medical service, you expect that they will give you the best possible advice and that they will exercise the utmost competence. When the patient-doctor relationship has been established, in fact, doctors have a legal obligation to provide you, as the patient, with a certain duty of care.
If you see a medical practitioner and have a negative experience, you might wonder whether he or she actually did fulfill the duty of care owed to you. Perhaps your medical practitioner dismissed your symptoms and failed to carry out appropriate tests, and later you found out that you had a serious condition. Perhaps you were misdiagnosed and had to go through treatment that did not help or worsened your existing condition. If you have experienced such a situation with your medical practitioner, you may want to learn more about the law so that you understand your rights in regard to taking action.
How is the negligence of a doctor examined?
It is true that all doctors owe a certain duty of care. However, even the most competent doctors can make mistakes sometimes. However, in order to determine whether a doctor’s mistake fell short of one’s duty of care, the judge will question, theoretically, whether a competent doctor would have acted the same way given the information that he or she had at the time.
What is vicarious liability?
Vicarious liability is a term to describe the liability that hospitals or other medical premises have in regard to their doctors and nurses. If a doctor makes a mistake or breaches his or her duty of care, it can mean that the hospital he or she is employed by could take some of the blame. This can be due to poor management of administrative practice of the hospital that could have potentially lead to the poor treatment of the patient in question.
If you are dissatisfied with the care you received from a doctor in the state of Iowa, it is important that you take action to get the compensation that you deserve.