Florida Medical Malpractice
Florida laws allow patients to pursue justice for their injuries and losses, if they are injured by a doctor, hospital, nurse or other health care professional’s mistake or deviation from the acceptable standard of care. However, malpractice suits are often complex and are always very aggressively litigated. Health care providers and their lawyers are not just defending claims for typically very substantial sums of money; they are also fighting to defend their reputations. The typical heated nature of medical malpractice litigation is merely one reason you need your own highly skilled and extremely experienced medical malpractice team fighting for your rights.
If you’ve been the victim of medical malpractice, you are not alone. About 195,000 U.S. patients died in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 due to potentially preventable medical errors, according to a study by HealthGrades, a leading independent health care quality company. Another 238,000 potentially preventable deaths occurred in hospitals during 2004 through 2006, according to the follow-up study by HealthGrades.
Medication errors are among the most common medical mistakes, accounting for at least 1.5 million injuries every year, according to a 2006 report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. The errors can occur when doctors write prescriptions, when the drug is administered or when doctors fail to monitor a patient’s adverse reaction to a medication.
Medical negligence in Florida is widespread and was spotlighted in a 2002 comprehensive report, “Florida’s Real Medical Malpractice Problem: Bad Doctors and Insurance Companies, Not the Legal System.” In that report, the Washington, D.C. based consumer watchdog group Public Citizen made the following findings:
- The number of medical errors reported by Florida hospitals exceeded the number of medical malpractice claims filed each year by 6 to 1. In one three year period, Florida hospitals reported 19,885 incidents but only 3,177 medical malpractice claims. This meant that for every six adverse incidents in the hospital, only one malpractice claim was ever filed.
- Six percent of the doctors in Florida were responsible for half the malpractice. Public Citizen’s analysis of the federal government’s National Practitioner Data Bank information found that 2,674 of the state’s 44,747 doctors at the time of the study had paid two or more malpractice awards to patients. These doctors were responsible for 51 percent of all payments.
- Many of Florida’s most dangerous doctors continued to practice. At the time of the report, there were 1,555 practicing physicians who had been disciplined by Florida’s state medical and osteopathic boards for incompetence, prescription drug abuses, sexual misconduct, criminal convictions, ethical lapses and other offenses.
Medical malpractice is all too common in Florida. We believe that skilled professionals like doctors should be held accountable for the mistakes they make in areas such as:
and many other areas as well.
Medical malpractice cases are by their very nature complex, expensive to pursue, and carry a high degree of financial risk due to several factors. It is important to consult with a qualified and experienced law firm, like Rosen & Ohr, P.A. as quickly as possible to protect your rights.
At the Law Office of Rosen & Ohr, P.A., we will offer you a free case consultation to discuss your case and help to determine whether or not you have an actionable medical malpractice claim. If your case is viable, our firm has the knowledge and passion to help you maximize your result. After our free consultation and preliminary evaluation, our medical malpractice team will start off by gathering all the appropriate medical documentation and records. We will then thoroughly review those with our own nurse and medical doctor consultants. Once we have pinned down the issues, a multi-party, nationwide search will be undertaken to find the most qualified and credentialed experts for the issues your case presents. Once the field is narrowed and we have verified no conflict of interests exist, namely that the other side has not already conferred with that expert, we will then send off the records for their review and initial opinion.
The next step is interviewing these potential experts to make sure they will be suitable and effective at communicating complicated information to jurors who will be hearing this all for the first time. Knowledge and experience in the subject matter of any particular case is certainly the most important criteria, however that is almost useless if the witness cannot effectively communicate his opinions to the jury. Medical malpractice is often referred to as a “battle of the experts.” Often times, who ever has the more qualified and believable expert will win the case. So with this in mind, we spare no expense in our search for the best, most intelligent and qualified experts. Medical professionals who “wrote the book” on the issues your case presents is invariably a substantial factor in our search. Sometimes we use different experts in different phases of the same case. Those decisions are completely dependent on what is in the best interest of each case.
During the litigation, numerous complex issues of medicine and law arise. We have assembled an outstanding team of caring, dedicated and highly skilled attorneys, paralegals, nurses and doctors to help us address each issue as it arises. Very often, no two medical malpractice cases are alike. However, the experienced law firm of Rosen & Ohr, P.A. has litigated every major type of medical malpractice case.
If you or a loved one has suffered from medical malpractice you will most likely be facing enormous medical bills, substantial lost wages and various other significant losses, both financial and emotional. You’ll need a highly effective, focused and competent law firm, like Rosen & Ohr, P.A., to fight for you.
Rosen & Ohr, P.A. has grown to become one of the preeminent law firms in this area of practice. We handle cases in Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pembroke Pines, Aventura, Hallandale, North Miami Beach, Sunny Isles, Cooper City, Dania Beach as well as ALL other areas of South Florida. We work on a contingency fee basis, which means we will not receive a fee unless you receive monetary compensation. Our office’s primary focus has and always will be serving our clients. We are dedicated to their causes and wholeheartedly believe that as long as we tirelessly focus on service, everything else will naturally follow from there.
If you or a loved one has suffering as a result of a South Florida health care provider’s malpractice, call the Law Office of Ronald Rosen today at (954) 981-1852 or contact us online for a free consultation. Let Rosen & Ohr, P.A. serve you!
