The practice of medicine can be incredibly complex, demanding years if not decades of dedicated study. Patients who come to healthcare facilities place their trust in the physicians and other medical professionals to uphold the highest standards of professional ethics and treat each patient in accordance with the most up-to-date standard of care accepted within the field of medicine. When medical malpractice results in a lapse in this standard, sometimes devastating physical, psychological, and emotional consequences can result.
While physical damage is often easily seen or revealed via scan, the emotional wounds and psychological trauma resulting from medical negligence may be harder to measure but equally impactful to patients and their families. A conversation with a New Mexico medical injury attorney at Erin Marshall Law may help you review your legal options if you or your family has been harmed by medical negligence. Call 505-218-9949 to reach our Albuquerque office.
What Are the 4 Elements of Medical Negligence?
A medical negligence case will need to prove the same broad elements of negligence as any other personal injury case that sounds in negligence. What can sometimes require a bit of finesse is how some of those elements are constructed. The four elements are as follows:
- Duty of care: The plaintiff must prove that the defendant owed them a duty of care. Usually, this is understood to mean a responsibility to act with a situationally appropriate degree of caution to prevent foreseeable harms.
- Breach of duty: The plaintiff must prove that the defendant breached the duty of care. Unfortunate accidents sometimes happen, even when everyone involved is taking appropriate precautions to prevent them. New Mexico courts will generally not hold a defendant liable for negligence when someone is hurt despite the defendant’s best efforts.
- Damages: Plaintiffs in personal injury cases based on negligence must prove they suffered damages. In medical malpractice cases, often the accounting of damages begins with physical injuries and the financial costs of securing additional treatment for them.
- Causation: The plaintiff in a negligence case will need to show that the damages they suffered were caused by the defendant’s breach of the duty of care. Typically, this element will be framed in terms of “proximate” cause – defining the term somewhat loosely for the sake of convenience, this usually means a causal factor without which the damages would not have occurred.
What tends to set medical malpractice cases apart from other personal injury lawsuits based on allegations of negligence is that the duty of care, and what constitutes a breach of that duty, are often configured somewhat differently in malpractice cases, owing to the special nature of the relationship between a patient and his or her physician or other healthcare provider.
What Is the Difference Between Malpractice and Negligence?
In some jurisdictions, there may be a formal distinction between malpractice vs. negligence. Certainly, in casual conversation, families discussing their understandable frustration in cases of medical injury tend to differentiate, treating malpractice as a more egregious failure than is implied by negligence.
One point these families may want to keep in mind, however, is that New Mexico’s Medical Malpractice Act (MMA) does not make this same distinction. Rather, the State of New Mexico defines negligence in medical injury cases in terms that relate directly to the breach of special trust and professional responsibility that often lies at the heart of the frustration patients and their families feel in medical negligence cases. Crucially, the MMA sets a higher expectation for the duty of care in medical negligence cases than typically applies to other tort matters in New Mexico civil litigation. This high bar also means that the duty of care is highly susceptible to breach, although, of course, New Mexico does also provide substantial protections for medical professionals.
Lingering Effects of Medical Negligence
Psychological, psychosocial, and emotional consequences of medical negligence can be far-reaching. A study published in 2021 in the Journal of Patient Safety reported that a majority of the patients and families surveyed reported ongoing psychological effects, years after the medical errors that had caused their trauma. More than half of the study participants reported still suffering harmful physical effects, while over a third of survey respondents were still struggling financially.
Precisely because the effects of medical negligence can be so deeply interwoven across multiple aspects of our lives, however, they can be extremely frustrating to quantify in court. Such quantifications are crucial to recover appropriate damages. In many cases, the same inextricability that makes the psychological and emotional effects of medical negligence challenging to isolate can also suggest strategies for beginning to compute damages.
Computation of Damages of Malpractice Cases
Technically speaking, there are other forms of “remedy” a plaintiff can request from a court, besides monetary damages: The parties in a family law case, for instance, may petition a court for enforcement, essentially asking the court to compel the other party in the case to abide by the terms of an existing court order. High-conflict family cases may also see one side or the other asking a court for orders of protection, to limit contact and minimize risk. Certain types of business law cases commonly ask for injunctive relief – requesting that the court either to prevent the other party from taking some action the plaintiff expects to be harmful, or to stop the defendant from doing something they have already begun, and which the plaintiff asserts is causing them harm (in this case the plaintiff may request damages from harms already sustained, in addition to the injunctive relief). In personal injury cases, however, the remedies sought by plaintiffs overwhelmingly consist of damages.
Compensatory Damages
The vast majority of damages ordered by courts are compensatory damages, meaning they are paid by defendants to compensate plaintiffs for the harms and losses the plaintiff has suffered as a result of the defendant’s conduct in each case. Compensatory damages are positioned in contrast to punitive damages, which are ordered by courts not to compensate the plaintiffs, but to punish the defendants for especially egregious behavior.
Punitive damages are not nearly as common as compensatory damages, and some states do not allow for punitive damages in cases based on medical negligence. New Mexico has long permitted punitive damages, but given the Department of Health’s report to the New Mexico legislature evaluating potential effects of a legislative change and the difficulty in securing punitive damages overall, the medical injury team at Erin Marshall Law generally prioritize computing an accurate estimate of compensatory damages before moving on to consider whether asking the court for punitive damages makes sense, based on the circumstances of the case.
Economic vs. Non-Economic Damages
The economic damages are, in most cases, the “easy” ones to calculate – although, as the study cited above suggests, they are rarely found in isolation. Economic damages usually consist of hospital bills and other expenses associated with medical negligence, including the costs of additional treatments and any wages lost in missing work due to medical injury.
Non-economic damages are where you might work with an attorney to arrive at a fair value for the emotional and psychological consequences of medical negligence. There are several ways to approach this process, but one of them is to begin by considering some of the “spillover” effects psychological trauma can have, triggering objectively quantifiable results – such as difficulty focusing at work, leading to delayed promotions – of inner turmoil.
Speak With a New Mexico Medical Injury Lawyer
Because developing a fair calculation for non-economic damages in cases with such deep personal impact can be extremely difficult, many people prefer to work with a malpractice lawyer when dealing with medical negligence claims. A conversation with an experienced member of our team at Erin Marshall Law may help you to gain a fuller understanding of your legal options for pursuing compensation that takes your deep psychological and emotional trauma, and that of your family, into account. Schedule a no-obligation consultation by calling our Albuquerque office at 505-218-9949 today.
