Hospitalists are a fairly new addition to a hospital’s workforce, and most go through residency training in internal medicine or family medicine. These individuals act as a primary care physician for patients in a hospital, and they are responsible for arranging care for an individual and ensuring that various physician specialists all do their jobs to ensure that a patient is treated in an appropriate manner.
Like any other medical practitioner, hospitalists may be deemed to have committed malpractice if they do not treat or care for a patient in an appropriate manner. The guideline is similar to that of other doctors, which is that a hospitalist should have done what someone else in their position would have done to care for a patient. Failing to meet this standard means they may have committed malpractice.
Based on information from research done by a leading medical malpractice insurance company, 78 percent of malpractice claims filed against hospitalists between 2007 and 2014 involved one of more of diagnostic errors, medication errors or improper treatment management. Researchers also determined that inadequate patient assessments were an issue in 35 percent of claims.
Not all cases where someone is injured due to a doctor fall under the heading of medical malpractice. If errors were not due to a doctor’s negligence or harm was due to a possible or unavoidable side effect, then a person might not have a malpractice claim. This is a complex area of the law, and an attorney representing a plaintiff will obtain the opinion of one or more medical experts before determining how to proceed.
For more information, contact a Cherry Hill Medical Malpractice Lawyer at Folkman Law. Call us at 856-354-9444.
