Community General Hospital

Community General Hospital is a level 1 trauma center. In 2011, Community General Hospital was acquired by Upstate Medical University. It has become Upstate University Hospital's second campus. Unfortunately, health care providers at any facility can make mistakes, and when they do, the result can be a significant worsening of injuries or even a wrongful death. Doctors and hospitals do not always admit errors or negligence. It is imperative to consult an experienced Syracuse medical malpractice lawyer about whether you may have a claim. If you suspect that you were harmed as a result of a misdiagnosis, a surgical error, or another incident of negligence at Community General Hospital, you should contact the attorneys at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano.

To establish a medical malpractice claim, your lawyer will need to show that there was a doctor-patient relationship giving rise to a professional duty of care, there was a breach of the professional duty of care, causation existed, and you suffered actual damages. The duty of professional care is the accepted standards and practices of the medical community. It varies depending on the doctor, the patient, and the situation at hand. A doctor who is board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology may owe a different duty of care than a primary care physician. Doctors may be required to conduct a differential diagnosis that is different if a patient is a 21-year-old female versus a 60-year-old male.

A breach of the professional duty of care can occur in different ways, depending on why the patient came to the health care provider, which symptoms the patient disclosed, and how the health care provider responded. A breach of the professional duty of care can be based on a health care provider's failure to consider a possible diagnosis based on the patient's symptoms. However, it could also be a result of failing to test whether a possible diagnosis is the correct diagnosis. For example, an oncologist who fails to conduct the proper tests for lung cancer and therefore fails to diagnose cancer in a timely fashion may have breached the professional duty of care. Similarly, a doctor who fails to diagnose stroke and sends a patient showing signs of stroke home, thereby resulting in more severe harm to the patient, may have breached the professional duty of care.

The breach of the professional duty of care must be a contributing cause to the patient's harm. You cannot recover damages if you would have had the same outcome regardless of the doctor, nurse, or other health care provider's actions or omissions.

Health care providers make life or death decisions every day. A health care provider’s negligence can cause fatal outcomes. If your spouse died due to medical malpractice, you may face substantial medical bills and funeral and burial costs, and you may experience difficulty meeting other obligations that were satisfied through a second income, such as a mortgage.

In New York, the personal representative of the decedent's estate can sue for wrongful death within two years of the death of the decedent. You will need to establish pecuniary losses to recover damages in a wrongful death lawsuit. For example, if your spouse died due to a failure to diagnose cancer, it may be possible to recover lost income. If your spouse was misdiagnosed when a heart attack was pending, and he died as a result of the misdiagnosis, you may be able to recover loss of spousal services and loss of parental guidance for your children. New York is different from some states because a decedent's survivors cannot recover damages for pain and suffering independent of pecuniary losses. However, damages can be recovered for a decedent's conscious pain and suffering prior to death.

If you have been injured because of medical malpractice at Community General Hospital in Syracuse, our law firm may be able to help you recover damages from the responsible parties. DeFrancisco & Falgiatano represents victims in Syracuse, Rochester, Binghamton, Auburn, Elmira, Norwich, Cortland, Delhi, Herkimer, Watertown, Lowville, Oneida, Wampsville, Utica, Canandaigua, Oswego, Cooperstown, Ithaca, and Lyons. Call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.