Birth Injury Malpractice

Birth injuries may occur when a physician or hospital nurse provides substandard care during the pregnancy or birthing process. If your child was injured as a result of a delivery room error or other birth-related negligence, you may be wondering about your child’s future. Here is some important information regarding birth injury malpractice.

Birth Injury Malpractice | Common Injuries

Devastating effects like paralysis, brain damage, and even death may happen to the mother and/or child as the result of birth-related negligence. Other birth injuries that may occur include:

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Birth Injury Malpractice | Making a Claim

In the State of Florida, you can’t jump right away into filing a medical malpractice suit. You have to go through a pre-suit process, during which time your attorney will gather all relevant medical records and send these to an expert for independent review. This expert will provide an affidavit, which your attorney will send via certified mail to the medical provider. That medical provider will have 90 days to consult with an attorney and malpractice carrier, and at the end of that period must either admit or deny the claim. If the medical provider denies your claim, your attorney will file a lawsuit.

To win your case, you need to do more than document substandard care. Substandard care per se does not cause damages. You need to prove causation – in other words, that the documented substandard care directly caused physical and/or emotional damages. In general, you also have to demonstrate catastrophic, long term, or permanent damages. If you recover before too far into your suit – and suits will, again, last years – you may only get enough in recoverable damages to pay your attorney and the expert witnesses you hired.

Birth Injury Malpractice | Hiring an Attorney

Experience matters most. You aren’t just looking for an attorney with plenty of court time and peer recommendations, either, though these things are important. Generally, an attorney with some medical background will be more successful in Florida medical malpractice cases. All this information is available online, but you shouldn’t stop there. Remember that you may spend years working with this person. You should meet face-to-face before deciding. You need someone you can trust, someone you’re comfortable talking to, someone who won’t bully you into a course of action you don’t want to take, and, ideally, someone you like.

If you or a loved one has been a victim of a birth injury in Florida, contact our experienced Tampa Birth Injury Lawyers today to schedule a free consultation.