Geneva General Hospital

Geneva General Hospital has 132 beds and was founded in 1898. It houses a 14-bed telemetry and intensive care unit. It offers a full range of diagnostics including nuclear medicine, MRI, cardiovascular diagnostics, and spiral CT scanning. It also has an acute physical rehabilitation center and an outpatient dialysis center. If you believe you may have been the victim of medical negligence at Geneva General Hospital, the skilled Geneva medical malpractice attorneys of DeFrancisco & Falgiatano can help you understand your legal rights and options.

When you go to the doctor, you may assume you will be diagnosed and treated competently. However, doctors and other health care providers do make mistakes. There are many different kinds of mistakes that may constitute medical malpractice. These include: failure to diagnose, misdiagnosis, failure to treat, laboratory errors, surgical errors, and postoperative errors. For example, if you are a 60-year-old with diabetes and high cholesterol and go to see your doctor about severe chest pain, and your doctor isn't paying close attention and just sends you home and tells you to take antacids without conducting a differential diagnosis, and then you have a heart attack at home, this may constitute medical malpractice. For another example, if your surgeon amputates the wrong limb, this is a surgical error that would likely constitute medical malpractice.

Not all mistakes constitute actionable medical malpractice. To show medical malpractice in court, you need to prove by a preponderance of the evidence: (1) you were owed a professional duty of care, (2) breach of duty, (3) causation, and (4) damages. The duty can vary depending on the specialty of the practitioner and the symptoms and history with which you present. For example, a family care practitioner may owe a professional duty to do different things than an oncologist.

Often one of the most important elements of a medical malpractice case is the expert witness. This element is important even before the lawsuit is filed. Under Rule 3012-a, you need to file a certificate of merit along with the initial complaint. The certificate of merit must state that you reviewed the case and consulted with at least one health care expert licensed to practice medicine, and that you reasonably believe the expert is knowledgeable about the relevant medical issues, and that based on the expert's review and consultation, you have concluded there is a reasonable basis for the lawsuit. If you can't get the consultation in time to comply with this requirement, you can file it within 90 days after the complaint is served.

In medical malpractice cases, you generally need to retain a credible expert to provide testimony about what the professional standard of care was under the circumstances, whether it was breached, and whether the breach caused injuries. Experts can provide important testimony about what specific failures occurred, whether these are failures to recognize symptoms, failures to order appropriate testing, failures to properly read lab results or images, improper prescriptions, failures to take adequate patient histories, surgical errors such as leaving a sponge inside a patient, ignoring important relevant facts about a patient's medical history, improper discharge, or inappropriate follow-up care after a patient underwent surgery. Often medical malpractice lawsuits turn into expert battles, which makes it important to retain an expert who is credible, has a good reputation, and performs well at trial. A skilled medical negligence lawyer can help you identify an appropriate expert for your case.

If you can establish liability, you may be able to obtain economic and noneconomic losses. Economic losses are concrete, documented losses such as medical expenses and missed work. Noneconomic losses are intangible losses such as pain and suffering, lost earning capacity, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment.

When you visit a doctor or hospital, you trust that you will be diagnosed and treated competently. Unfortunately, some health care providers' actions and omissions deviate from the professional standard of care. They may not tell you they made a mistake, even when the results are serious injuries or death. The lawyers at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano represent patients injured at Geneva General Hospital and other facilities due to medical negligence by health care providers. Please call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.