10 Most Common Causes of Malpractice Suits Against Physicians

If you are wondering about reasons to sue a doctor, then read our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians.

Today, we cannot imagine the world without doctors. They are present in our lives from the moment we are born and they spend their career trying to save people from various diseases. We are used to going to the hospital every time something happens, and we rely on the doctor’s help to ease our pain. But how often do we think about how doctors feel? Being a physician is a highly stressful and very demanding job that brings many difficulties along. Not to mention years and years of studying to become a doctor in the first place.

Apart from all the things mentioned above, doctors must deal with more than that. Malpractice suits are more often than we think and more or less every doctor experiences a malpractice suit at least once in their career. According to a Medscape report from 2015, 64% of physicians experience at least one malpractice suit by the age of 54, and Medical Malpractice Center in the United States states that there are between 15,000-19,000 suits against doctors per year. Medical negligence is the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States and 195,000 patients die each year due to preventable diseases. These are some pretty serious numbers, but what does malpractice suit include, you wonder?

Medical malpractice involves a medical error which can be related to treatment, diagnosis, health management, etc. According to Medical News Today, medical malpractice occurs when a healthcare professional neglects to provide appropriate treatment, doesn’t take an appropriate action or causes harm or injury due to a substandard treatment. Mistakes are always possible even if the doctor has taken all necessary actions because there are risks involved in every medical situation. At times these mistakes are accidental as the doctor tried to make the best decision based on his experience and knowledge. But very often they are considered negligence. If you are interested in knowing more about medical specialties that get sued the most, then read our list of 10 Worst Medical Specialties with Highest Malpractice Rates.

There are a number of things or factors that must be involved in order for a medical practice to be considered as malpractice. Those factors include failure to provide proper care, an injury that is a result of negligence, and that has damaging consequences such as disability, hardship, etc. In order to determine the most common causes of medical malpractice, we sought help from Medscape as they surveyed about 4,000 physicians in 2015, in order to find out more about reasons why doctors get sued the most, and Center For Disease Control and Prevention. Check out our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians. 

10. Unnecessary or Incorrect Surgery

If a doctor performed an unnecessary surgery that had no medical value, the patient has the right to consider suing the doctor, and this often happens. Not only do doctors sometimes perform unnecessary surgeries but they also perform them in an incorrect way, causing many consequences. There must be a legitimate need for surgery, and it must come from a reasonable concern. However, out 48 million surgeries performed in the U.S. each year, a great number of them are unnecessary.

9. Retained Surgical Item

As weird as this may sound, leaving things inside after surgery is one of the most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians. It is very dangerous as things left inside can cause serious damage. Studies show that this happens once in every 5,000 to 7,000 and usually, the thing that is often forgotten inside the patient is a surgical sponge, according to The Washington Post.

8. Not Following Up

After surgery or prescribing a new medication, a doctor is to provide subsequent aftercare to determine the results of the treatment and whether it helped the patient or not. If not provided with follow-up care after receiving medical treatment or surgery, that ranks 8th on our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians patients may have grounds for suing for malpractice. Even though they are legally obliged to provide follow-up care, doctors often fail to do so.

7. Improperly Obtaining or Lack of Informed Consent

As patients, we have the right to decide whether we want something done on our body or not. Failure to give adequate information to the patient so he can make an appropriate decision is cause for malpractice suits and this happens often. Patients have the legal right to be informed and advised of all the risks associated with the medical procedure, and failure to do so leads to malpractice suits.

6. Not Following Safety Procedures

According to Medscape, 3% of doctors who participated in the study named not following safety procedures as the main cause for malpractice suits. A physician is obliged to follow these procedures to ensure the safety of the patient. That includes reviewing the patient’s history before starting new treatments, taking samples and tests as well as verbally communicating the risks.

5. Errors in Medication Administration

According to Nolo and a study from 2006, medication errors harm nearly 1.5 million people in the U.S. every year, and 4% of doctors in the Medscape study named this as one of the most common malpractice suits. Medication errors vary from the initial prescription to the administration of the drug, but often they include dosage errors. If a patient gets too little or too much of a drug, he can suffer serious consequences.

4. Poor Documentation of Patient Instruction

Another common reason on our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians is poor documentation of patient instruction, and 4% of physicians mentioned being sued for this type of medical malpractice in the Medscape study. Accurate and complete documentation is very important as it helps tell the patient’s story, but if it inhibits a clear representation then it’s poor documentation, according to For The RecorD.

3. Failure to Treat

Failure to treat is among the most common reasons for suing a physician on our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians. 12% of respondents in the Medscape study stated that they were sued for failing to treat. Failure to treat includes healthcare-associated infections, which have become a great problem in recent years, and these infections are often associated with the devices used in medical procedures, according to U.S. Center For Disease Control and Prevention.

2. Patient Suffering an Abnormal Injury

It is not uncommon for a patient to suffer a terrible injury due to the negligence of the physician. Sadly, many of those injuries result in disabilities or even death. 31% of physicians that have participated in the Medscape study indicated that they had been sued for injuring a patient during treatment.

1. Failure to Diagnose

Same as the previous cause on our list of most common causes of malpractice suits against physicians, failure to diagnose a patient’s medical condition was the cause that 31% of physicians polled were sued for medical malpractice. This is one of the most common causes of malpractice suits, and they include heart attacks, breast cancer, lung cancer, appendicitis, as well as diabetes and hypertension, according to the Right Diagnosis.