Doctors and nurses are dedicated professionals, but they can also be fallible. Sometimes, doctors commit acts of negligence that cause severe harm to their patients. This may include misdiagnosis, prescribing the wrong medication, performing a surgery without sufficient training or experience and other forms of medical malpractice.

A Seattle medical malpractice attorney can help victims of these errors receive fair compensation for their losses. Their job is to sift through medical records and find evidence of the malpractice and determine what the next steps should be. These claims are often complex and can be difficult for victims to prove. The legal team at Elk & Elk has extensive experience in these types of cases.

In Washington, before filing a Doctor Malpractice Attorney Seattle claim, the plaintiff must first submit the case to a state-approved medical review board. The board reviews the claim and if it is deemed to have merit, the lawsuit can be filed. In order to file a medical malpractice claim, the patient must be able to show that the healthcare provider violated the standard of care and that this breach led to their injuries.

The standard of care is defined as the degree of skill, knowledge and learning expected from a healthcare professional in their field at the time they provided treatment to the patient. This includes all of the actions they would reasonably be expected to take under similar circumstances. Despite this, side effects and complications can still occur in some cases, but they are not always considered medical malpractice.

Generally, in a medical malpractice case, the attorney will argue that the healthcare provider failed to adhere to the standard of care and this breach caused the patient to suffer serious injuries. In order to prove this, the attorney will need to establish that a doctor-patient relationship existed and that the patient agreed to the medical provider’s treatment. However, if a medical professional made a joke at a party that eating raw chicken cures baldness and the guest took it seriously, this wouldn’t be considered medical malpractice since there was no official doctor-patient relationship.

A Seattle medical malpractice lawyer will have to prove that the healthcare provider breached the standard of care and that these breaches were the primary cause of the patient’s injuries. In order to do this, the attorney will need to enlist a qualified expert who can testify about the breach and how it caused the injury. This can be done by obtaining all available medical documents, including test results and second opinions from other healthcare providers.