Fighting medical negligence with the law

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2 years ago

Stories of people who went to the hospital for routine procedures or medical conditions that ordinarily are not life threatening but were mishandled and lost their lives as a result is rife in Nigeria especially through wrong or faulty diagnosis and consequent erroneous treatments or medication.

And the sad reality is that going to a big and acclimated expensive specialist hospital does not make you immune to this based on the peculiarity of the challenges biseiging the Nigerian health sector; brain drain, poor power supply, underfunding, lack of equipment and poor staff strength as well as poor remuneration.

But in spite of these challenges, some issues are caused basically by human error, negligence and lack of proper care by hospital staff and it is for such cases that the law made provisions for medical negligence by filing charges against perpetrators or the hospital itself.

And based on the law, you can only drag a medical.practitioner to court for negligence if you are the victim of a medical error. But when the error has cost the life of the victim or a child, then the law allows the parents or next of kin to sue for compensation.

As a result all medical practitioners that are involved in the care and misdiagnosis or negligence; doctors, nurses, dentists, opticians, opthalmologists, lab scientists and all other medical professionals who are saddled with the burden of care towards patients can be dragged to court.

You can sue for compensation for medical negligence when you put a family member has suffered some harm as a result of the act being complained about.

Also, you have a period of three years; depending on your state to claim compensation for medical negligence and the court will consider factors like age, severity of injury, employment status and associated losses caused as a result of the negligent treatment when deciding the amount of compensation an individual can get.

The first step to take when such happens is to brief a lawyer to review your case and tell you if you have a case worthy of pursuit and what compensation is open under the law.

Nigerians need to know their rights and stop allowing cases of medical negligence to be buried without the perpetrator being brought to book.

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