When a child is sick or hurt and needs to go to the hospital, we trust doctors, nurses, and the entire hospital team completely. We expect them to know exactly what to do and to be very careful. However, even in a trusted hospital, mistakes can sometimes occur. When a hospital, or its staff (like nurses or technicians), makes a careless mistake that harms your child, it’s a serious form of medical malpractice.
- What It Is: An injury or a worsening of a child’s health condition that happens because a doctor, nurse, hospital, or other medical staff member made a mistake while treating them. This mistake should not have occurred if they had followed the proper rules and accepted standards of medical care. This is more than just a bad outcome; it’s a preventable error.
- Causes: This can include a wide range of mistakes made in the hospital setting:
- Wrong Diagnosis or Delayed Diagnosis: A doctor might miss a serious illness (like cancer, appendicitis, or a severe infection like meningitis) or say it’s something else, so the child doesn’t get the right treatment in time. Delays can be deadly.
- Medication Errors: This is a big problem in hospitals. Giving the wrong medicine, the wrong amount (dose), giving medicine at the wrong time, or giving medicine to the wrong child. Alarmingly, pediatric patients are three times more likely to experience a medication error in a hospital compared to adults. Many of these errors are preventable.
- Nursing Errors: Nurses may fail to monitor a child closely enough, neglect to call a doctor when a child’s condition worsens, or improperly follow a doctor’s orders.
- Surgical Mistakes: Errors made during an operation, like injuring a healthy organ, leaving something inside the body, or operating on the wrong part of the body.
- Hospital Infections: A child getting a serious infection while in the hospital that could have been prevented if proper hygiene and sterilization rules were followed.
- Equipment Malfunctions: Injuries caused by medical equipment that is faulty or not used correctly.
- Statistics: Medical errors are a significant concern across healthcare systems. While precise statistics on child hospital malpractice are complex, the overall rate of hospital errors is high. It’s estimated that one in three hospitalized children is affected by a medical error. Many medical errors are never officially reported.
- Long-Term Impact: The harm from child hospital malpractice can be devastating and often leads to more severe consequences than the original illness. It can lead to prolonged illness, permanent disability (like brain damage from a missed infection or delayed treatment), severe organ damage, the need for more surgeries, severe developmental delays, or even wrongful death. These cases are very complex. They need lawyers who understand both complex medical procedures and detailed legal requirements.
If your child was seriously harmed because of a mistake made by a hospital or its staff, you need a child injury team of lawyers who understand both complex medical care and the strict legal rules for hospitals. Please call The Child & Birth Injury Lawyers immediately. We are here to fight for your child’s rights.
