Delivery Trauma Arising from Inadequate Communication

When there is ineffective communication between health care providers during labor and delivery, there may be delivery trauma. This delivery trauma can result in either maternal injuries or birth injuries. Often, these injuries are expensive to treat. You shouldn’t have to bear the costs if your doctor deviated from the accepted professional standard of care. You can consult an experienced Syracuse birth injury attorney to determine your legal options. At DeFrancisco & Falgiatano, we may be able to represent you in a lawsuit for damages in connection with delivery trauma arising out of inadequate communication.

Mistakes may happen as a result of communication breakdowns between medical staff. It is vital that a pregnancy as well as a labor and delivery be properly documented, and that medical information regarding the patient be timely distributed to the appropriate medical team. Sometimes an inadequate follow-up can result in injuries to a baby or mother. In other cases, patients face improper treatment because the wrong information was shared, and again, the result can be serious physical, emotional and financial consequences. Sometimes patient data is inconsistently shared among the team or the wrong patient is prioritized for delivery.

For example, if a laboring mother’s condition is rapidly declining and the nurse provides vital signs and patient history to the doctor but leaves out certain key facts, the doctor may miss important information about the mother’s condition that would have required him to order an emergency C-section. The mother could lose too much blood and face extensive, costly complications. Similarly, if there is fetal distress that is not communicated to a doctor, she may not take adequate steps to ensure the well-being of the baby. When, for example, a baby loses oxygen, he may suffer brain damage. A baby’s birth injuries can be emotionally painful to both parents and child, and cause significant expense for many years. A dedicated birth injury lawyer can assess whether the facts of your case may lend themselves to a viable claim of negligence.

To establish medical malpractice in a birth injury lawsuit, you will need to show: (1) the health care provider deviated from the accepted professional standards of care and (2) the deviation caused you substantial harm. An adverse outcome by itself is not medical malpractice. But if communication between your providers deviated from the professional standard of care that applied to health care providers practicing in the same area and same geographic region as them, thereby causing substantial harm, it may be possible to recover damages through a medical malpractice lawsuit.

In New York, an OB-GYN needs to use the reasonable amount of learning and skill typically held by OB-GYNs in the locality where she practices when treating patients. Under this rule, you’ll need to find an expert witness who is familiar with the standard of care within your doctor’s practice area, and that expert is likely to be a board-certified OB-GYN. Sometimes communication that might be adequate in one practice area is not adequate for labor and delivery, and the result may be delivery trauma that causes real harm.

The standard of care related to adequate communication may also vary depending on the circumstances surrounding your particular labor and delivery. For example, a high-risk pregnancy may require different monitoring and communication than a low-risk pregnancy does.

If you can establish liability for inadequate communication that led to birth injuries in your case, you may be able to recover compensatory damages. These are damages meant to put you back into the position you would have been in had there been no medical malpractice, and can include amounts for medical bills, pain and suffering, and more.

If you or your baby were harmed as a result of delivery trauma arising from inadequate communication in Syracuse, you can talk to a seasoned birth injury lawyer. At DeFrancisco & Falgiatano, we represent people in Syracuse, Rochester, and throughout Upstate New York, including in Wampsville, Watertown, Cooperstown, Lowville, Lyons, Elmira, Canandaigua, Oswego, Binghamton, Oneida, Ithaca, Auburn, Herkimer, and Utica. Call DeFrancisco & Falgiatano at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.