Oneida Hospital is an acute care hospital with 101 beds and an extended care facility with 160 beds. It also has a licensed short-term rehab facility that is operated by Oneida Health Systems, Inc. Located in the city of Oneida, the hospital serves about 24 communities in western Oneida County and Madison County. Other health care services provided in other locations include maternal health clinics, long term and short term skilled nursing, imaging, sleep study, and pulmonary function. When you seek medical care, you expect and trust that a doctor will use their skills and experience to diagnose your problem and help you heal. Unfortunately, sometimes the trust is misplaced, and doctors and hospitals do make mistakes. If you believe that you were harmed by medical malpractice at Oneida Hospital, you should consult the Oneida medical malpractice attorneys at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano.
Pursuing a Malpractice Claim for CompensationMedical malpractice does not occur in the context of every medical mistake. Instead, it happens if a health care professional or hospital does not provide medical care within the bounds of the accepted standards of the medical profession, and as a result, you get injured, get sick, or worsen in your condition. Your attorney will need to prove that it is more likely than not that you had a doctor-patient relationship, and while diagnosing you or treating you, the health care provider did not act as a competent health care provider in that specialty should behave. Also, your attorney needs to show that you were harmed because of the failure to act in accordance with the standard of care.
Medical malpractice can happen in many different ways. For example, it can occur in the context of an obstetrician's failure to order a C-section in response to fetal hypoxia, resulting in brain damage to the baby. As a parent, you may be able to recover damages for a birth injury. For another example, medical malpractice could occur when a doctor fails to include cancer in his differential diagnosis and therefore fails to test this possibility and diagnose cancer, resulting in the patient getting sicker and passing away. For another example, a doctor may properly diagnose you with leukemia but administer the wrong therapy, resulting in the leukemia worsening. For still another example, you might go to the ER with chest pains, but if a doctor fails to monitor you and simply prescribes an antacid, and you go home and suffer a heart attack, you may have a malpractice claim.
Medical procedures can be very risky. However, sometimes, a doctor does not provide information about the risks of a particular procedure. If a doctor at Oneida Hospital does not give you the information that you need to make an informed decision, and you are injured during the procedure as a result of the risk of which you were unaware, you may be able to sue for this failure to obtain informed consent. Your lawyer will need to prove that you would not have had the procedure done if you had known the dangers.
Often, it is necessary for both the plaintiff and the defendant to retain experienced and credible experts to establish what the professional standard of care was under the circumstances, whether it was breached, and whether the breach, rather than the natural course of the illness or injury, caused harm. There are only limited situations in which no expert would be necessary. For example, there may be injuries that could not occur unless there was negligence. For example, if a surgeon amputates the wrong limb, it might not be necessary to retain an expert to opine that the surgeon breached the duty of professional care. Similarly, if a sponge was left inside a body cavity during a spinal surgery, and as a result you suffer severe pain and require another surgery, this may not require an expert's testimony.
Seek Guidance from a Medical Negligence Attorney in OneidaIf you suffered from medical malpractice while you were a patient at Oneida Hospital, our law firm may be able to help you recover damages from the parties responsible for your injuries. The attorneys at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano know how to build these claims and can retain persuasive experts on your behalf. Call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.