Nursing Negligence
Whether you are at your doctor’s office, the VA, or a military hospital or clinic, you might notice that most of your care is provided by a nurse. Like other health care providers, nurses are expected to perform their duties with the knowledge, skills, competence and care expected of other nurses with the same degree of training and education. Nursing as a profession is staffed with qualified, caring medical professionals, but not all nurses are as careful or as competent as they need to be, and some qualified nurses find themselves in an understaffed hospital environment where they are overworked for long hours and not given the support they need.
The medical malpractice attorneys at Bertling Law Group hold nurses, hospitals and clinics responsible for nursing errors caused by negligence or malpractice that could have and should have been avoided. If you were harmed in a California hospital, clinic or doctor’s office, or at a VA facility or military hospital or clinic nationwide, call Bertling Law Group for a free consultation. We’ll help you get answers to your questions and find out what went wrong. If a nurse’s negligence is to blame, we’ll hold the appropriate parties accountable to you for the harm they have caused.
Why Does Nursing Negligence Occur?
Nursing malpractice occurs regardless of how experienced the nurse is. While the most inexperienced nurses tend to make the most serious mistakes, a significant majority of malpractice claims involve nurses who have practiced for 16 years or more.
The leading cause of nursing errors in California and nationwide include:
- Failing to perform an appropriate and thorough patient assessment
- Providing a substandard level of care
- Leaving important medical history information out of a patient’s file
- Failing to assess the need for medical intervention
- Failing to properly monitor vital signs during surgery and communicate concern
- Recording vital signs or diagnostic test results incorrectly
- Committing medication errors such as delivering the wrong medicine, the wrong dosage, or using the wrong method of delivery
Who Is Liable for Nursing Negligence?
Nurses are everywhere to be found in doctors’ offices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, surgery centers, etc. There are registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, licensed vocational nurses and nurse practitioners. All of these nurses play primary and critical roles in patient care, and their mistakes can be particularly harmful or deadly.
Nursing errors can be solely the fault of the nurses who make them, but they can also happen because the hospital or other facility puts them in an untenable position. Hospitals have a duty to screen, hire, train and supervise their nurses, and they also have a duty to hire enough qualified nurses to meet patient demand. It is also the hospital’s responsibility to develop and implement important safety protocols so that nurses can communicate with each other and doctors as needed, and so important knowledge and information is transferred between shifts. Nurses and hospitals alike may be liable for nursing negligence and the harm that follows. At Bertling Law Group, our experienced team of medical malpractice attorneys does what it takes to find out what happened in a given instance and determine who is responsible for a medical mistake. We’ll hold all responsible parties accountable to the people they have harmed and work to ensure similar incidents don’t happen to others in the future.
Get Help With Nursing Negligence and the Harm It Caused
If you believe that you or your loved one were harmed by nursing negligence in a California hospital or doctor’s office, in a VA hospital or outpatient facility, or in a military hospital or clinic nationwide, call Bertling Law Group at 844-295-7558. There’s no fee if we can’t get compensation for your harm.
