A Medical Negligence Matter – How Do We Prove It?

A Medical Negligence Matter is when a doctor or medical professional causes you harm by breaching his or her duty of care.

But how do we actually prove it? That is where evidence comes in.

Evidence is the process by which you prove things to a court. Therefore in a medical negligence matter, we need to look for evidence to prove each of the elements of negligence.

Fortunately in Australia doctors are required to keep extensive records now and it is a criminal offence to refuse to provide or destroy medical records.

This makes our job of proving your case easier. We break gathering evidence down into several sections depending on where your case is up to.

Initial Consult

In your initial free consult with United Legal, we have one of our senior lawyers meet with you to figure out if you have a claim.

This is where we ask a lot of questions about what happened, how you were hurt, how this still impacts you, and try to get a broad overview of your potential case.

If you have any medical records with you we ask you to bring those in so we can get an idea of what happened from those documents as well.

Building your case

Once we have met with you we then begin gathering further evidence to build your case. Hospital records are also requested from every doctor that was involved in your treatment.

Because by law these records must be kept and provided on request we can find out the details of what occurred at the hospital from them.

Once we get these we are able to look over these carefully and build a full picture of exactly what occurred, what went wrong, and who is at fault.

Preparing for court

The final stage involves us sending you and your hospital records to a ‘medico-legal expert

This is simply a doctor who has experience in medical negligence that can assess your injuries and describe what went wrong and how the doctors should have acted.

These reports are the culmination of the work done in the previous stages and do a lot of the work in identifying the specific acts by your doctor that caused you harm by breaching the doctor’s duty of care.

Final Words

At the end of the day, this process involves us getting to know you and reading over records of your treatment.

We bring together an experienced team of doctors and lawyers.

We can help you show a court that the harm you are suffering would never have happened if a responsible doctor had been acting and you deserve compensation for this!