Surgical Error Salt Lake City

John: There can be instances when a doctor is performing a surgery, where he either may be performing the surgery on a wrong body part or in the wrong site. There may be instruments or materials that are left behind in the person. More commonly what happens is the doctor uses the incorrect procedure for the condition that the patient has. Norman: The way to properly manage a surgical error case is similar to the way that we handle every malpractice case. I always tell our clients there's 3 things we have to establish. First, we have to identify something that was done wrong. We have to identify a mistake. Often when clients come to our office, they've had a bad outcome. Someone has died, for example, and they don't know why. The first order of business is to pull the medical records. We evaluate those here; I have nurses that work with me. I review the records, and then ultimately, we would wind up selecting a medical specialist, usually a physician, to review those records to find out what went wrong. Then the second thing we do is we hold the individuals that created those errors, that created the injury . . . our job is to hold them accountable so that it doesn't happen again, so that they change the way they practice medicine. Then third and ultimately, is to obtain for our clients fair compensation to recover lost wages, to recover medical expenses, out-of-pocket expenses, and then to look forward over their lifetime and to recover for them all of the wages or future medical expenses that will be lost or that they will require for care of their injury. John: The statute of limitations, typically, is 2 years from the time the patient discovers or should have discovered the issue. For some facilities in the state, the statute of limitations can be as short as 1 year. It's important for somebody to come to us as soon as they have some suspicion that something may have been done incorrectly. Norman: It is essential to get an attorney to handle the medical malpractice claim. Of all of the types of personal injury claims, I believe medical malpractice claims are the most difficult. Doctors and their insurance carriers are represented by the very best lawyers in town. Without a lawyer to walk you through the labyrinth, the maze, it really is almost impossible to get a reasonable recovery or a fair recovery in a personal injury case that involves medical malpractice. You have to have a lawyer, and not just a lawyer, you have to have a lawyer that does a lot of medical malpractice.