Main Players Involved in a Fairfax Medical Malpractice Case

If you have been the victim of medical malpractice and are interested in filing a claim, the following is information you should know regarding who is involved in a typical malpractice claim and how an attorney can help you understand the relationship of each of these members. To discuss your case more specifically and who will be involved in your claim, call and schedule a consultation with a Fairfax medical malpractice lawyer today.

Who Are The Different Parties Involved in a Medical Malpractice Claim?

In general, the parties that are going to be involved in a medical malpractice claim are:

• The medical providers, which often time are part of a larger practice
• The insurer of the medical practice
• Your own insurance company
• Your lawyer
• The lawyer for the defense
• Representatives from the defendants insurance company
• Many others

With this said, however, it is also going to depend on the type of case. So for example, if it’s a claim against a gynecologist for a failure to diagnose a cervical cancer or something like that, there may be fewer players involved because that case may just include the gynecologist and their practice group or maybe someone who read the radiology film or a pathologist who looked at a pap smear. That may be fewer players in that hypothetical case than if it’s something where someone was the victim of malpractice in the emergency room and there might have been three doctors and eight nurses working and then an emergency surgery with two more doctors. It is important to isolate the role played by each provider and determine who may be liable for the plaintiff’s injuries.

Everyone that touched the patient or participated in their care, whether they directly laid hands on them or simply made an order, those people are all going to have a potential role in a case. Something else that can depend would be the type of facility, if it’s a clinic, a surgery center, a hospital, a teaching hospital, these things all change the landscape also because if it’s a hospital there are going to be residents as well as attending physicians who are responsible for overseeing the residents. If it’s a private hospital that doesn’t have residents there, maybe there will be fewer players involved so to speak, but it really does depend on every case.

How Can A Lawyer Help You Understand The Relationship Between The Different Parties?

The easiest thing is to sit down and have a conversation about all of the potential parties involved. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your lawyer is going to be in a position to work to protect your rights and they need to have information from you to be able to do so. Your lawyer will need a complete list of doctors from whom you have received treatment or care after the alleged malpractice and a list of doctors that you saw beforehand leading up to that.

A lot of the time people don’t realize that it’s important to know what happened before as well as after the malpractice and there are a lot of reasons for that. A lawyer can sit down with you and discuss who is in what position, why different players are involved, and can really help put you at ease as far as what the process is going to be moving forward. It’s always a stressful process if you’re an injured victim, but an attorney that can help to explain the situation, explain the next steps and explain the plan will go a long way toward making you feel comfortable.