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Denver Medical Malpractice Lawyer

We are experienced in medical malpractice law and can help clients determine whether or not malpractice has occurred. Doctors and other health-care providers must follow certain standards when caring for patients. While a simple mistake is not enough to constitute negligence or malpractice, a death or injury caused by the failure to provide reasonably appropriate or common standards of care or the failure to diagnose an easily detectable illness may be malpractice. When someone is injured as a result of the negligence or misconduct of a medical professional, the law provides a means of obtaining compensation, allowing the injured party or parties to get on with their lives.

Below are just a few examples of situations giving rise to medical malpractice claims:

Failure to diagnosis cancer due to inaccurate reading of test results.
Spinal cord injury during epidural anesthesia.
Spinal cord injury during spinal tap.
Nerve or muscle injury by physical therapist during therapy.
Nerve damage caused by chiropractor.
Spinal cord injury due to blood clot after back surgery.
Eye injuries during Lasik/PRK procedures.
Instruments left in during surgery.
Sponges left in during surgery.
Surgery performed in a manner outside the standard of care (standard method for procedure) resulting in organ or nerve damage.
Death or permanent injury caused by negligent anesthesia administration.
Failure to properly treat complication during surgery.
Improper prescription administration by pharmacy.
Improper prescription given by treating doctor.
Failure of nurses to follow doctor's orders.
Failure to diagnosis and/or treat bed sores in hospitals or nursing homes.
Failure to properly supervise patient post-operatively.
Failure to properly supervise patient in nursing home.

ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES

Failure to Diagnosis fetal distress.
Failure to properly treat fetal Distress.
Failure to timely perform Cesarean.
Failure to timely treat illness.
Failure to diagnosis and treat Sepsis.
Operation on wrong location.
Injury to nerve or artery during laparoscopic surgery.
Failure to timely treat pre-eclampsia.
Improper placement of G-tube.
Improper placement of catheter.
Failure to treat dehydration by nursing home.

If you believe you have a situation may have been the result of malpractice by a health care professional, please feel free to call our office for a free, no-obligation consultation.

Learn more about your Doctor through the Public Citizens Health Research Group which runs a web site about doctors who have public information backgrounds involving discipline or legal action. (Click Here)

BREAKING NEWS - Postoperative infections, surgical wounds accidentally opening and other often-preventable complications lead to thousands of deaths and more than $9 billion in extra costs annually. Learn More

BREAKING NEWS: OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT REPORT DECLARES THERE IS NO MEDICAL MALPRACTICE CRISIS

Conclusions of the August 2003 GAO Report on Medical Malpractice

1. There is no medical malpractice crisis. In its study of five states without major tort reforms, the report concludes that the doctors have wildly overstated their case. E.g. "We also determined that many of the reported physician actions and hospital-based service reductions were not substantiated or did not widely affect access to health care" (p. 12). "Although some reports have received extensive media coverage, in each of the five states we found that actual numbers of physician departures were sometimes inaccurate or involved relatively few physicians" (p. 17). "Contrary to reports of reductions in mammograms in Florida and Pennsylvania, our analysis showed that utilization of these services among Medicare beneficiaries is higher than the national average in both [states]" (p. 21).

2. The report was "commissioned" by the proponents of tort reform, who clearly wanted the GAO to buttress their case, but this independent report actually undercuts it.

3. The report notes that the AMA wanted the GAO to withhold release of the report until "state and national medical and specialty associations" could provide better information. But these were the very groups that had supplied much of the data that the GAO used as the basis for many of its findings (p. 38).

4. The report strongly supports the case that there are lots of reasons for the few problems of access to care the GAO could confirm, while the AMA blames everything on medical malpractice litigation. "The problems we confirmed were limited to scattered, often rural, locations and in most cases providers identified long-standing factors in addition to malpractice pressures that affected the availability of services" (p. 13).

5. The GAO is extremely skeptical of the claim that the tort system encourages unnecessary defensive medicine. The report takes the offense against the AMA position by noting that (1) some defensive medicine is good medicine, (2) managed care discourages bad defensive medicine, and (3) doctors do defensive medicine because they make money from defensive medicine (p. 26-27).

6. It characterizes the CBO study on the supposed savings resulting from HR5 as actually finding that state tort laws have no impact on medical spending (p. 29).

7. It criticizes the HHS study for publishing a wildly inflated estimate, based on an improper methodology, of potential savings from defensive medicine (p. 29).

8. It measures growth in claims on a per capita basis, not an aggregate basis. This is the right way to do it, making it clear that claims payments have grown far slower than any measure of inflation, in both cap states and non-cap states (p. 35).

9. The report consistently emphasizes that the surveys upon which the AMA bases its claims have a low response rate and thus "preclude the ability to reliably generalize the survey results to all physicians" (p. 38).

10. It specifically criticizes as unreliable the two data sources relied on by the doctors: PIAA ("it does not share proprietary state-level claims data"); and Jury Verdict Research ("a varied and unsystematic data collection process") (p. 52).

11. The analysis supports the case that the doctors, in effect, blackmailed the legislatures and governors in Nevada, Pennsylvania and West Virginia (p. 14-15).

12. The one unhelpful finding in the report-that claims and premiums have risen faster in states with caps than without-is explained by reference to the experience in just two jurisdictions, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania: if these two states are eliminated, then for the time period 1996-2002, average claims payments in the states without caps were about the same as in those states with caps (p. 34-35).

13. It emphasizes that, to the extent that premiums or claims are lower in cap states than non-cap states, multiple factors are responsible-which is the same conclusion as the first GAO report.

The full Report is available at http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-03-836.