You expect medical professionals to provide you with competent, safe care. Still, mistakes can happen, and some can cause serious harm or death. Understanding these negligence claims can help identify when and how they occurred and what type of compensation you can receive.
What counts as malpractice?
To have a valid malpractice claim, you will need to prove that:
- Breach of standard of care: A healthcare provider did not provide the level of skill a reasonably competent professional would in the same situation.
- Causation: This failure directly caused your injury or made your condition worse.
- Damages: You experienced real and measurable harm because of this.
A treatment that fails or a different approach that might have worked does not automatically mean malpractice.
Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis
Research in the journal Patient Safety shows that failure to diagnose causes more than half of all diagnosis-related malpractice claims while delayed diagnosis accounts for nearly a quarter of these cases. These errors can worsen your health, limit your treatment options and reduce the possibility of getting better.
Diagnostic errors can also affect more than your health. You might receive unnecessary treatments based on the wrong diagnosis or miss critical opportunities for care that could prevent serious harm.
Surgical errors and birth injuries
Surgical mistakes represent another major category of medical malpractice claims. They happen when a doctor operates on the wrong body part, leaves tools inside you, mishandles the anesthesia, causes nerve damage or fails to prevent infections.
Birth injuries form a particularly serious subset of surgical malpractice. These can include failure to perform a necessary cesarean section in time, improper use of delivery instruments, such as forceps or vacuum extractors, and failure to detect or respond to fetal distress.
Medication errors
Prescription and medication errors happen to thousands of patients every year. You might encounter these at different points, from when a doctor writes your prescription to when the pharmacy fills it or when a nurse gives it in a hospital.
You could be at risk of receiving the wrong medicine, an incorrect dose or dangerous drug interactions. Some may only cause mild side effects, while others could lead to more serious health problems, such as organ damage and death.
Filing medical malpractice claims
To file a medical malpractice claim in Iowa, you will need to do so within two years from the date you found out or should have known, with reasonable effort, about your injury or the death of a loved one. You cannot file a claim more than six years after the act or mistake that caused the injury. Exceptions may apply if a foreign object remains in the body.
Before you start the formal legal process, you must give each defendant a Certificate of Merit Affidavit. A qualified medical expert must sign this document to confirm that the standard of care was not met,proving negligence. If you miss the deadline for submitting the affidavit, the court may dismiss your case permanently.
State law also limits non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering. As of February 2023, you can recover up to $1 million from individual providers or clinics or up to $2 million from hospitals. There is no limit on economic damages (medical expenses, lost wages), and exceptions apply if the provider acted with actual malice.