Follow-up care is critical after discharge from a hospital for a number of reasons. These include ones connected with your health as well as potential legal considerations related to medical malpractice or personal injury cases.
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Medical Importance of Follow-Up Care
In most cases, when you are discharged from a hospital, that simply means that you are well enough to continue your recovery at home, not that you are fully recovered. In other words, the medical issues that you experienced may not have been completely resolved.
For that reason, it is usually important for you to remain under the care of a medical professional. That care can involve further checkups and seeing if you are recovering well, if any complications are developing and exactly how you are responding to medications that you were prescribed.
Potential Medical Malpractice Claims
If you receive poor follow-up care following your hospital discharge or were discharged too soon, you may want to consult an experienced medical malpractice lawyer like those at Thomas Law Offices to help you assess whether you may have a medical malpractice case.
Several examples of when medical professionals may have not provided the due care that they are legally required to include:
However, be aware that simply experiencing these circumstances does not necessarily mean that medical malpractice occurred. Sometimes, medical conditions worsen even though proper care and treatment were provided. A medical malpractice lawyer can help you determine if a viable claim exists.
In any case, all of these circumstances can significantly jeopardize a patient’s health. More specifically, you may experience worsening health conditions and a delayed diagnosis of complications.
Increased medical costs that you may be struggling to pay because you were not provided the due care that you should have been is a related potential result of medical malpractice.
Also keep in mind that if your health declines significantly after being discharged, potentially resulting in your quickly returning to the hospital for further treatment there, that could be a sign that you were unsafely discharged, that you were discharged before you should have been.
That said, if a patient does not follow what was recommended, that has the potential to harm a medical malpractice lawsuit that could have been or has been filed. That said, it does not change what happened before those recommendations were not followed. In other words, if the malpractice had already occurred prior to then, the lawsuit could remain focused on those grounds. It just may or may not become difficult to show that that malpractice had occurred.
Regardless, if you are considering filing a medical malpractice claim, make sure to keep all relevant records as well as regularly record the symptoms that you are experiencing at various steps in the process. This documentation of the medical care that you have and have not received and what you are experiencing, such as may be recorded in a symptom journal, can prove invaluable to this process.
If you believe that you have in fact received inadequate follow-up care as a result of a doctor or other medical professional breaching their legal duty of care and suffered harm as a result of that, you may be entitled to recover damages, which can be related to medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering.
The physical harm that you ended up suffering can include complications and additional symptoms and pain.
Also note that if a patient has died in connection with a breach of the legally imposed duty of care, their family may be able to recover damages as a result of a medical malpractice claim.
Potential Impact on a Personal Injury Claim
Another reason why follow-up care is critical after being discharged from a hospital is because failing to follow up on treatment yourself can harm a personal injury claim that you may have in a number of ways. Simply put, you should show that you are doing your best to mitigate damages.
The main reason why this is important is because insurance companies and their legal teams may scrutinize this element of the process. Even something that may seem minor to you, such as missing a few appointments due to miscommunication or scheduling issues, can end up having a significant effect on your case. That said, the specific circumstances matter as there are valid reasons for missing those appointments.
What often happens next if you are minimizing the importance of treatment is those insurance companies claiming that you either were not injured as severely as you said you were or that you were but then healed much more quickly than would warrant the type of settlement that you are looking for.
Conclusion
For numerous reasons, post-hospital discharge follow-up care is critical, both medically and legally. For those reasons, you should exercise due diligence as you look to recover as fully and quickly as possible. Doing so will help medical malpractice or personal injury claims that you may be able to pursue and recover damages from.
