Doctors operate under a legal “duty of care”, a standard requiring they provide an acceptable standard of care for their patients. That duty is breached if they either harm their patient or lapse in their duty to treat them correctly, which is usually due to negligence.
Determining Legal Action
In order to have a case, the alleged malpractice must have led to some sort of injury that another doctor in the same field, under the same circumstance would not have made. Generally, successful medical and negligence malpractice claims that are successful involve those where a permanent injury occurs or the patient suffers a long-term loss of work, or physical ability.
Determining Legal Responsibility
If one has a case worth pursuing, the person or facility liable must be determined and named. A variety of factors should be considered when determining if the physician or facility where the treatment was administered is considered legally responsible. On the one hand, if a hospital employee such as a nurse makes a mistake while under the supervision of a doctor, the responsibility may shift to the doctor (assuming said doctor was present and could have prevented the problem).
In cases such as this the individual doctor or support staff is liable rather than the hospital.
Hospital - News Articles

Early in 2014, Dominique Adkins underwent an operation to have her thyroid gland removed at a hospital in Charleston, West Virginia. Adkins, 38 at the time, came out of the operation unable to speak and in severe pain. According to a medical malpractice lawsuit, filed in March 2016, her doctor allegedly impaired critical nerves in
Read More
Joan Simmons woke up on July 20, 2014 in unbearable pain. She was somehow able to get herself to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s/Chandler Hospital, located in Savannah, Georgia. Simmons, then 58, told the attending emergency room physicians that she had an intense pain coming from her back. According to court records, Simmons was
Read More