If you believe that you have suffered at the hands of a medical professional, can you make a claim for medical negligence compensation without incurring substantial legal costs? How can you protect yourself from the potential costs liability to the National Health Service Litigation Authority (NHSLA)? This article looks at the costs position of medical negligence claims.
What Is Medical Negligence?
It is first worth considering what can amount to medical negligence. Broadly speaking medical negligence happens if a medical professional whose care you are under, fails to treat you to an accepted standard or to treat you at all and you suffer an injury. This could be treatment by a surgeon in a hospital, your general practitioner failing to diagnose a serious condition, or even a physiotherapist treating you when they should not have done so.
Why Do These Claims Cost So Much?
Medical negligence is a very complicated area of law, and therefore also a costly one to pursue. You will need medical evidence from another medical professional to advise whether the treating doctor was negligent. You are also likely to need an opinion from a barrister as well as your solicitor’s representation. In addition to your own legal costs, if you pursue a claim against the NHSLA and lose your claim, you may also be liable to pay their legal costs. Therefore, costs can quickly rise; often to several thousands of pounds. If you do not have any legal expenses insurance you will be responsible for these legal costs yourself.
This explains why a No Win No Fee Agreement might be a very useful tool for you if you want to pursue a medical negligence compensation claim but do not have a limitless supply of funds.
What Is A Medical Negligence No Win No Fee Agreement?
This agreement allows you to pursue a claim for compensation without paying your legal costs as you proceed with your claim. Alongside the claim you will take out what is called an ‘After The Event’ legal expenses insurance policy. This protects you should you pursue your claim and fail to win. In this case, if the NHSLA obtain a costs order against you these costs will be paid for by the Legal Expenses Insurance company and not you. Therefore, it limits your risk. Many specialist medical negligence solicitors will now act for you under a No Win No Fee Agreement.
When you contact a solicitor they will ask for all of the information relating to your potential medical negligence claim. They may ask to see your medical records and then they will assess whether your claim is suitable for a No Win No Fee Medical Negligence Agreement. Usually they will agree to make these preliminary investigations without charging you, although you will need to check with each solicitor before proceeding.
You will then be able to decide whether you want to make your claim for compensation.
Summary. Medical Negligence No Win No Fee agreements allow people to make a claim for compensation when otherwise they might not have been able to do so.
Posts Tagged ‘negligence’
Medical Negligence No Win No Fee
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Seattle Personal Injury Lawyer Discusses Consequences of Hospital Negligence
Monday, March 29th, 2010Regardless of the fact that most medical practitioners and others are strong adherents to the Hippocratic Oath, there is always a chance of error in a medical environment. Through the ages of humanity, healers have worked to mediate a science that many would call imperfect—always work toward the good while recognizing the risks of procedures and treatments.In today’s medical environment, risk has taken on a new form. Medical networks routinely categorize and assess different kinds of risk and try to plan for a crisis involving a medical error. Information professionals keep statistics and records on hand as part of a greater campaign to deal with medical risk issues. Part of this system includes the event of hospital negligence where an error or omission can cause personal injury for a patient.In a traditional American medical environment, a doctor was an individual healer providing overall care to a community. Today’s medical environment is much different. A case in point involves medical care centers in the state of Washington in the country’s northeast where large urban areas reflect a significant population, and medical networks provide risk assessments for a large community. In the state of Washington and beyond, hospital negligence and similar situations show that dealing with malpractice, errors and omissions in care is not always a straightforward process.Look at a standard Washington hospital bill and you can see that there is often more than one party billing for services. In fact, when talking about a hospital care bill, it’s more accurate to speak about it in the plural since today, many practitioners bill separately. This means the typical patient in a hospital stay will receive many different envelopes with separate bills for their one-time inpatient visit, or even for a routine outpatient procedure.Dealing with the multiple parties involved in a hospital billing situation is just one of the complexities of litigating for hospital negligence. Even if the victim can narrow down what aspect of the care led to a negative condition, legalities in claims for compensation often get in the way. Regardless of the fact that aspects of hospital negligence affecting care often leave a paper trail (for example, a minor surgical procedure is often recorded on paper with indications of placement, etc.), it can still be hard for a patient or family members to figure out how to identify fault in a hospital negligence situation.Washington patients and those across America turn to legal teams and professionals to help communicate with the healers in their area regarding any past procedure or visit that left them with specific negative conditions. Such negligent actions may affect a patient’s health in that he or she develops a condition or suffers from preventable mistakes anywhere within the medical care network—from the hospital to outpatient labs, doctor’s offices or clinics. These legal teams take care to provide the right research in order to document how hospital negligence affected their clients. They also know how to effectively communicate within a system that relies heavily on documentation where today’s doctors do not often communicate directly with any given party in a hospital negligence case—at least not without corresponding legal paperwork being filed. Getting the right messages across is important in what professional personal injury lawyers provide to clients. The other part of this communication is breaking down the situation into explainable legal results for clients who are not familiar with how hospital negligence cases are handled or how settlements and judgments are awarded.By speaking with a skilled Seattle personal injury attorney, someone who has been negatively impacted by medical care can see how his or her case relates to greater precedent. In the state of Washington, individuals or households can locate firms based in urban centers like Seattle where experience with large medical networks provides unique knowledge of how to navigate the legal system to get fair compensation for a mistake that caused harm to the patient.
No win no fee not to blame for high medical negligence costs
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010It was recently revealed that botched treatments in Yorkshire’s hospitals and health centres cost the taxpayer at least £83m in only one year. This is the same story across the UK. Although many are quick to blame ‘greedy’ no win no fee lawyers, it seems there is a lot more behind the high cost to the NHS.
Many of the compensation payments are thought to relate to clinical negligence claims made years previously, which have only been settled after lengthy battles in the courts. With no win no fee arrangements it is now easier than ever to make a claim against a hospital for substandard treatment.
Now, with Yorkshires health bodies receiving nearly 1,000 claims a year, patient care campaigners are calling for the system to be overhauled to help ensure claimants are compensated sooner and less money is spent on legal costs.
One top clinical negligence lawyer has said the amount paid to law firms involved in major cases was “a tiny figure” compared to the billions of pounds the NHS loses annually through less serious procedural errors.
Once a claim is settled, cash is paid centrally by the NHSLA, meaning it does not come out of a health body’s budget. The health body is required to make a contribution every year based on estimation made by the NHSLA, so essentially as the amount of compensation paid rises the estimations will continue to rise also.
The British Medical Association has called for the introduction of a new compensation system that apportions no blame and sets limits on the size of damages. “It is important that patients have a right to make their complaints and, where appropriate, receive compensation,” a spokesman said.
“However, the current system is cumbersome and expensive and takes money away from direct patient care. Without action to address this problem the alternative is that doctors will increasingly practise defensive medicine and hold back on some treatments for fear of legal action. This would not be in the best interests of the patient,” he added.
Yorkshire’s health body received nearly one thousand claims last year and many of these are expected to take years to settle. With the rising cost of legal fees this could well mean that the cost to health bodies will increase.
Peter Walsh, of patients’ charity Action Against Medical Accidents, said: “the value of settlements had soared in recent years because more patients were surviving but then relying on costly around-the-clock care.”
He added that: “Government measures had made it harder for people to qualify for legal aid, forcing them to bring no win no fee cases which are more costly to the NHS when settled in the claimant’s favour.”
“None of these costs would be incurred at all if we avoided the mistakes from happening in the first place,” Mr Walsh said. The biggest cost is not the financial cost; it is the human cost underlying every claim.”
He called for the Government to press ahead with schemes it promised in the NHS Redress Act 2006, which was designed to promote an alternative to litigation in clinical negligence cases.
It seems that Yorkshire is mirroring the rest of the country with high claims which are naively being put down to a growing compensation culture made worse by unscrupulous no win no fee lawyers. The unfortunate truth is little is being done to speed up the claims process, nor stopping the mistake being made in the first place. So if nothing is done the annual bill for claims is just going to get bigger and bigger until something is done about it.
