Imagine that you are riding your bike out on a nice summer day. All is going well until a driver in a car does not notice the red light and hits you while you are riding your bike. You end up with a broken leg and have to go to the hospital and eventually need surgery. You miss days of work and rack up a lot of medical bills. In this situation, someone should immediately contact a personal injury attorney to help them get compensated for the work they missed and to have their medical bills covered. A few weeks go by and it is time for your surgery. During the surgery, the surgeon uses the wrong medical device and makes your injury even worse than it started. The previous surgery has resulted in you needing a second one and causing you to spend even more time at the hospital, getting an infection, and racking up even more medical bills. You want to make a claim against the surgeon but what is the next step? It is common knowledge that if someone gets hurt from someone being negligent, they should hire a personal injury attorney to help them out. However, if that injury is the direct result of a medical professional’s mistake, that person would need to take a look at a more specialized area of the law and get a medical malpractice attorney. A medical malpractice lawyer Kansas City, MO trusts, such as from Royce Injury Attorneys, is considered to be a personal injury attorney because medical malpractice falls into the category of personal injury, however, due to its special nature, not all personal injury attorneys are malpractice attorneys.
Even though both personal injury and medical malpractice law exist to correct a civil wrong and help an individual that was injured through no fault of their own, both practices are very different. Medical malpractice cases are very difficult. They tend to need a lot of time, extensive research, and documentation. When someone claims a personal injury, it tends to be from a broad scope of things easy to pick out making them not very complicated. Usually it is just against one other person from something like a car accident. Medical malpractice suits deal directly with and hospital care leading the case to become more difficult. It is also much easier to see who was at fault during a strict personal injury case. More times than not, it is pretty obvious who the negligent party was. Such as someone ran a red light, or did not stop at a stop sign. There is usually a police report that will back up the evidence and make it a lot easier to find fault. During a malpractice injury, the hospital and the doctors involved will fight tooth and nail to defend themselves and deny that the injury was their fault. This is going to create a lot more time and research that needs to be done since this is beyond the scope of a simple car crash. Medical malpractice suits also typically require outside help. For example, an expert medical witness will be brought into the case. These experts will review the case and the documents involved to make sure that everything is correct. The hospital does not want to be sued nor do doctors want to run the risk of losing their licenses to practice.