It can be rather difficult to win a compensation award for personal injury caused by medical negligence. There are plenty of inherent risks and things that cannot be immediately identified right away, and these delays or problems can cause serious suffering.
But we must show that the medical professionals involved have been negligent in the expected duty of care they have for you to make a claim – so how do we do this?
I read an article from the BBC this morning about a woman who was involved in a crash after which she waited nearly four hours for the emergency services to arrive. According to the report, North East Ambulance Service have apologised for the considerable delay which left the female victim in her car for three hours. It then took almost a further hour to transport her to hospital.
The service has commented to say that they were dealing with exceptionally high volumes of callouts at that time in which they were prioritising those in most danger. But that being said, whilst the ambulance services have been widely criticised in recent press articles about slow response times, four hours is a considerable period of time to wait for help.
Our NHS system is seemingly fighting an uphill struggle to cope with higher than ever volumes of patients whilst the economy continues to struggle. Although I have heard that we are on the way to economic recovery, we still face a potential crisis with high waiting times and lengthy referral waits. The issue is that these delays can be very costly to a person’s health. Waiting too long for the right treatment can lead to serious complications and further undue suffering.
So if you believe you have been the victim of an unnecessary delay, you may be entitled to claim for personal injury compensation.
It’s very important to stress that, as referenced above, it is not easy to establish negligence in these sorts of cases. We must show that the delay was unreasonable and / or could have been prevented.
If the delays was caused because a medical professional failed to refer you even though they had the right knowledge to hand that they ought to have referred you, that is when we can make a claim. If you have been continually dismissed despite your symptoms indicating something that a medical professional ought to have diagnosed you with or referred you elsewhere for, we can look to establish negligence.
You need to get a good lawyer though – we will instruct a medical expert who is qualified to provide a medico-legal report to us, and we will use this as our evidence. If the expert agrees that, based on their appointment with you and any evidence in your records, you should have been diagnosed or referred, you may be able to bring a claim.
We are a firm of specialist personal injury lawyers with particular expertise in representing victims for serious compensation claims and medical negligence cases. Call our team now on 0800 634 75 75 and we can look to advise if we think you have a claim or not.
