Onondaga County Medical Malpractice

Onondaga County is home to the city of Syracuse. Its population as of 2010 consisted of nearly half a million inhabitants. Besides Syracuse, the county is home to a number of villages, towns, and hamlets, as well as an Indian reservation. When someone in Onondaga County goes to a doctor, they expect to get better rather than worse. However, medical malpractice can result in a worsening of a medical condition or in additional serious injuries. It occurs when doctors, hospitals, or other health care professionals fail to diagnose or treat someone according to the accepted standards and practices of the medical community, and the person is injured as a result. If you are harmed by an incident of medical malpractice, you should retain an experienced attorney to pursue damages. At DeFrancisco and Falgiatano, we are Onondaga County medical malpractice lawyers who may be able to provide counsel and representation.

To win in a medical malpractice case, you need to show that you were under a doctor or other health care provider's care, the doctor or other health care provider failed to meet the professional standard of care for that specialty while counseling, diagnosing, or treating you, and because of that failure, your medical condition worsened, or you became sick or were injured. Medical malpractice can occur in connection with situations such as a cancer misdiagnosis, a delay in diagnosing a heart attack, improper treatment during labor and delivery that results in birth injuries, surgical errors, medication errors, improper treatment, failure to inform of specific risks, and others.

Doctors are supposed to advise you of the specific risks associated with having a particular procedure done. When a doctor does not disclose risks so that you can give informed consent to the procedure, and the undisclosed condition occurs, you may be able to sue for medical malpractice. A medical malpractice attorney in Onondaga County would try to show that you would not have undergone the procedure if you had known the risks.

It can be difficult for a layperson to know whether medical malpractice occurred. Generally, you should consult an attorney if you suspect medical malpractice. Assuming that an expert agrees that there was medical malpractice, your attorney will usually use expert witnesses to establish what the professional standard of care was, that the defendant’s conduct was a breach of the standard of care, and causation. The expert witness should be credible and is usually in the same specialty as the defendant.

There are some situations in which an expert may not be needed because the jury can understand that it is medical malpractice without the expert providing technical opinions. For example, if you go to the hospital for back surgery, and a sponge is left inside your back, a jury can understand that this is medical malpractice. Or, for another example, if you are hospitalized for pneumonia, but instead a doctor removes your gall bladder, the jury can understand that this is malpractice.

Informed consent actions require an Onondaga County medical malpractice attorney to show that a health care provider failed to disclose risks, alternatives, and benefits of a particular procedure or treatment that a reasonable practitioner would have disclosed. They also must prove that someone in your position, if fully informed, would choose not to undergo the procedure, and the lack of informed consent was a proximate cause of the injury that resulted. Both sides will present expert evidence on these issues. The expert opinions need to be based on facts on the record or personally known to the expert witness. The jury can make a determination about the credibility of each expert.

If you are able to establish liability, you may be able to recover compensatory damages. These can vary depending on the specific nature of the injuries, but they commonly include medical expenses, lost wages, out-of-pocket expenses, and pain and suffering.

If you are harmed due to a doctor's failure to properly diagnose or treat you in Onondaga County, you may have a basis to bring a medical malpractice lawsuit. Our firm provides aggressive representation to patients and their families, including the parents of birth injury victims. Call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.