Most Common Medical Malpractice Cases

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U.S. malpractice claims cost healthcare systems $8.9 billion every year, according to World Metrics. The effects of these claims go beyond individual lawsuits. 

Medical malpractice is not the same thing as a bad medical outcome. Illness can just progress, surgeries can have complications, and medications often come with side effects even when the care is delivered competently. So for a medical error to turn into a real legal claim, there are four particular legal elements that have to show up. When patients are unsure whether or not they might have a legal case, it helps to know the common errors associated with patients’ complaints and how to distinguish a bad medical result from malpractice.

The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) maintains a record of malpractice payments across the United States. As per the information provided in the databank, allegations regarding misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, diagnostic errors, and inaccurate diagnosis constitute 32% of medical malpractice cases. Surgical errors are roughly 25%. Treatment errors and obstetric injuries each land around 10%. Together these categories cover the most common situations where a healthcare provider’s conduct falls under the standard of care and, as a consequence, causes patient harm.

Let’s learn the legal elements that are associated with most common medical malpractice cases and how they can be grounds for a lawsuit.

The Four Legal Elements Every Malpractice Case Requires

The National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine presented a clear checklist that constitutes a medical malpractice case. These four elements are duty, breach, causation, and damages. All four must be proven; if even one is missing, the whole case collapses, no matter how serious the injury seems.

Duty usually starts with the doctor-patient relationship. Once a provider takes on the care of a patient, they owe that patient a duty to perform within the standard of care that fits their specific specialty. According to Gastonia medical malpractice lawyer D. Brad Collins, the standard of care given to you or your loved one served as the main element for building a medical malpractice case. 

Breach is when the provider’s actions fell below that standard, like what a reasonably competent provider with the same training would have done in similar circumstances. Damages are the actual, compensable harm that the patient has suffered.

Causation is where many cases stumble, and it’s also the element patients often misunderstand the most when thinking of a potential claim. If the disease or underlying condition was what actually caused the harm, then the malpractice claim fails. That whole line between negligent care and the disease itself is often the central, contested point once the case gets into litigation. 

Diagnostic Errors: The Leading Category of Claims

Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis together represent the biggest single source of malpractice claims. One of the frequent errors in medical practice tends to be failure to detect or even misdiagnose diseases such as cancer, infection, heart attack, and stroke. In every case, immediate detection or treatment application provides significant timing for treatment. For instance, breast cancer in the same individual has a higher likelihood of being cured if it is found in Stage I rather than III. Another clear example is that a stroke is more likely to show a positive prognosis if treated within the recommended treatment period rather than 12 hours later.

In the event of a misdiagnosis lawsuit, the real issue is not whether the correct diagnosis was made later or whether another diagnosis was first entertained. Instead, the key question is whether a reasonably competent physician, using the standard of care, would have arrived at the correct diagnosis sooner, based on the information available then. Such an inquiry is typically a question of fact, which usually requires a physician trained in the discipline to come to court and explain the necessary standards and how the provider in question failed to meet them.

The most common details triggering diagnostic error complaints include not seeking the correct tests, failing to seek an expert opinion, and not re-evaluating abnormal results when they are available.

Surgical Errors: Wrong Sites, Foreign Objects, and Negligent Technique

The variety of surgical mistakes is wide and includes such errors as performing an operation on a wrong patient’s body part or on a wrong person, accidentally creating tissue damage, tools or sponges being lost inside the patient, or performing a procedure using a method that is below the normal standard of professionalism. They also cover anesthesia mistakes, wrong dosage, and failure to adjust or respond to a patient’s changing condition mid-procedure.

A sponge left inside a patient’s abdominal space or a leg amputated on the incorrect side are examples of errors that clearly breach the standard of care. These events do not need a deep, detailed discussion about surgical technique. Other surgical mistakes instead require a close review of the operative notes, the imaging, and an expert look at what exact procedure was actually done.

Surgical complications are distinct from surgical errors. A complication refers to a negative outcome that may result even when the correct execution of a procedure has been done. For example, the medical team may view postoperative infections as an expected risk rather than malpractice. Whether a particular complication is below the accepted standard of care depends on the circumstances of the case at that point in time and on the approach the medical team takes to that complication.

The Causation Problem: Why a Clear Error Does Not Always Mean a Viable Claim

Causation is the element most frequently fought over in court once things go to trial.  

Think about a patient whose cancer is misdiagnosed for eight months. Proving causation can be messy since you have to ask what would have happened with a correct and timely diagnosis. If the cancer was already metastatic when the patient first came in, then the delayed diagnosis didn’t cause the spread. If the cancer is of a slow-growing kind, where an eight-month delay wouldn’t really alter the treatment plan or the prognosis, then causation can be particularly difficult to establish.  

In nearly every medical malpractice case, the defense tries to pin the patient’s harm on the underlying disease, not on the provider’s negligence. The plaintiff has to bring expert testimony showing that a timely, correct diagnosis, a proper surgical approach, or appropriate medication management would have led to a materially different result. The malpractice doesn’t legally cause injuries that would have happened anyway, regardless of what the provider did or didn’t do.  

The earliest step in evaluating a potential malpractice case is not just figuring out whether an error occurred, but also asking whether that error changed the outcome. Cases where the answer is clearly yes tend to get settled quickly. Cases where the answer is up for dispute are the ones that end up in trial.

Medication Errors and Birth Injuries

Medication Errors

Prescription mishaps do harm to an estimated 1.5 million patients each year across the United States, and the annual costs, tied to preventable medication faults, go past $3.5 billion. In everyday life, the usual culprits tend to be the wrong drug, the wrong drug dosage, and failure to account for specific allergies or drug interactions. There’s also the medicine given through the wrong route. Insulin and morphine, both high-alert medications with narrow therapeutic windows, frequently appear in serious medication error disputes.

Birth Injuries

Obstetric malpractice claims tend to arise when something goes wrong during labor, delivery, or in the postpartum period right after birth. A big part of it is the failure to monitor fetal heart rate tracings properly or waiting too long to respond when there are signals of fetal distress. Sometimes, the assistive delivery instruments like forceps or vacuum extractors are used in the wrong way or at the wrong moment. Complications get mismanaged too and may result in serious emergencies such as umbilical cord prolapse or placental abruption.

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, cerebral palsy, and brachial plexus injuries may result from mismanagement of labor and child delivery. In many birth injury claims, there are multiple potential defendants, not just one person. Examples of potentially liable parties include the delivering physician, the nurses, and the hospital itself.

What Distinguishes Negligence From an Adverse Outcome

Not every patient who ends up with a poor outcome actually went through malpractice. The standard of care isn’t perfection but more like what a reasonably competent provider, with the same kind of training, would have done in that same situation. According to the medical malpractice reference from the NIH National Library of Medicine, the acceptable level of care is judged by what medical practice demands, not by some perfect or ‘ideal’ care that is impossible to achieve.

For a medical malpractice case to be relevant, the claim must demonstrate that the act in question deviated from standard protocol and has a causal link to the harm suffered by the patient. Both parts need expert medical analysis. The sooner that analysis starts, the more accurately we can evaluate the overall strength of the claim.