Medical Malpractice

Filing a Medical Malpractice, Personal Injury or Wrongful Death Claim in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

A child is very ill when born and is later diagnosed as having cerebral palsy. A patient dies following routine elective surgery. Many immediately assume the doctor was at fault while some believe it was just meant to be. As lawyers representing patients in Pennsylvania with medical malpractice cases, we know that every bad result is not preventable. On the other hand, many are. The difficulty, of course, is finding out what happened and why.

How do you begin? Start by asking questions. If the answers don't make sense or if you have other suspicions, then perhaps you should seek another professional's opinion, preferably a lawyer whose practice is devoted to medical malpractice cases.

Once a determination has been made that a viable medical malpractice claim exists that should be pursued, a suit generally is required because the people in charge of hospitals and the insurers who represent physicians and nurses have no interest in helping solve or expose problems early on. They want to test your determination and that of your attorney. They want the suit to be filed, not that they are happy you filed it, but they want it filed. They won’t just come running forward saying, “I’m so sorry this happened to you, what can we do to help?”

The medical malpractice claim is not different than any other personal injury claim. If a person carelessly went through a stop sign causing an accident that resulted in life-changing injury, that case would involve many similar elements of a medical malpractice case, in which the same result occurred. The only difference is that in medical malpractice cases one has to use expert testimony to prove what the standard of care is, whereas in a regular personal injury case, an auto accident for example, you don’t need to have an expert to help a jury conclude that if someone has crossed the center line and front-ended a school bus and amputated the legs of the children in the first seat, that it was a bad thing to do, and the person doing it ought to be responsible to try to make as whole as possible the lives of those persons who have been injured.

After suit is filed there are vast differences between the typical personal injury suit and a medical negligence suit because of the need to have access to and consult qualified experts to do the needed medical research, to read and interpret the hospital and other records, including films, ex-rays, computerized axial tomographic studies and MRI’s. One might have tissue specimens on a slide to be examined in a PAP smear case, or an improperly read biopsy case where someone has taken a specimen of tissue, has looked at it and said it’s normal when in fact it shows cancer and no one acts upon it.

Then, after the experts have been consulted, one has to develop a plan for how life is to be made whole for a seriously injured person. For that purpose you consult physical medicine specialists, neurologists, speech therapists, physical therapists, and life care planners – those people who help you to determine how it’s possible with money to make a difference, a meaningful and positive difference – in the life of the victim.