Abogados especializados en negligencia médica en Akron

Dealing with a Medical Malpractice Injury

At Kisling, Nestico & Redick, our skilled Akron medical malpractice attorneys understand how overwhelming these situations can be. With the cost of medical bills and significant pain and suffering, you may not know where to start. Our dedicated legal team of Akron lawyers, backed by the firm’s Ohio medical malpractice lawyers statewide, can help. We will handle all of the legal aspects of your case while you focus on recovery.

Types of Medical Malpractice We Handle in Akron

Most healthcare professionals do their jobs carefully. Medical malpractice is what happens when one does not: a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, technician, or facility falls below the accepted standard of care and a patient is harmed as a result. These are the kinds of cases our Akron office handles most often.

Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis

When a doctor is unsure what is wrong, the right answer is more testing, a specialist referral, or close follow-up. A misdiagnosis happens when the doctor assigns the wrong condition instead, and a delayed diagnosis happens when the right condition is caught too late to treat it well. Either way, the patient loses time, and with cancer, stroke, heart attack, and infection, time is the whole case.

A misdiagnosis claim turns on what a competent doctor would have done with the same symptoms and test results. Cancer is misdiagnosed more often than most patients expect; how often cancer is misdiagnosed surprises most people, and the records usually show the warning signs that were missed.

Errores quirúrgicos

Surgical errors include operating on the wrong site or the wrong patient, damaging organs, nerves, or blood vessels during the procedure, leaving instruments or sponges inside the body, and failing to manage bleeding or infection afterward. Some of these are “never events” that should not happen under any circumstances.

Not every bad surgical outcome is malpractice, because every surgery carries known risks. The question is whether the surgeon and the surgical team met the standard of care before, during, and after the operation, and whether you were properly told the risks before consenting.

Medication errors

Medication errors happen at every step: a doctor prescribes the wrong drug or dose, a pharmacist fills it incorrectly, a nurse administers it to the wrong patient or at the wrong time, or nobody checks for an interaction with something the patient already takes.

The harm ranges from a missed course of treatment to overdose, organ damage, and death. Pharmacy and hospital records usually document exactly what was ordered and what was given, which makes these among the more provable malpractice claims.

Anesthesia mistakes

Anesthesia mistakes include too much or too little anesthetic, failure to review the patient’s history and allergies, failure to monitor vital signs during the procedure, and intubation errors that cut off oxygen. Because the patient is unconscious, these errors can go unnoticed for critical minutes.

The consequences can be severe: brain injury from lack of oxygen, cardiac events, nerve damage from positioning, and anesthesia awareness, where a patient is conscious but paralyzed during surgery. The anesthesia record, taken minute by minute, is the central piece of evidence.

Birth injuries

A child is most vulnerable during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Birth injuries include failing to monitor fetal distress, delaying a necessary C-section, misusing forceps or vacuum extraction, mismanaging the mother’s conditions during pregnancy, and errors in the hours after birth. Cerebral palsy, brachial plexus injuries, and oxygen-deprivation brain injuries are the most serious results.

These cases involve a lifetime of care costs and are handled by lawyers who work with obstetric and pediatric experts. Our Akron birth injury lawyers take on claims involving hospitals and delivery providers across Summit County.

Hospital and nursing errors

Hospital errors are failures of the system rather than one provider: understaffing, poor handoffs between shifts, ignored call lights, falls, hospital-acquired infections, pressure injuries, and charting mistakes that lead to the wrong treatment. Nursing errors, such as failing to monitor a patient or report a change in condition to a doctor, fall in the same category.

The hospital can be liable for its own policies and for the negligence of its employees. Whether a doctor who practices there is an employee or an independent contractor is one of the first questions we sort out, because it determines who pays.

Failure to treat

Failure to treat covers a correct diagnosis followed by the wrong response: discharging a patient too early, not ordering the tests or follow-up the diagnosis calls for, not referring to a specialist, or ignoring a patient’s reported symptoms. Emergency rooms and urgent cares that send patients home with a serious condition are a common source of these claims.

These cases often come down to the chart: what the provider knew, when they knew it, and what the standard of care required them to do next.

How to Prove Medical Malpractice in Ohio

A medical malpractice claim in Ohio has four elements, and the plaintiff has to prove all of them:

• Duty of care. A provider-patient relationship existed, so the provider owed you a duty to treat you competently.
• Breach of the standard of care. The provider did something a reasonably careful provider in the same specialty would not have done, or failed to do something one would have done.
• Causation. The breach, and not the underlying illness or an unrelated cause, is what harmed you.
• Damages. You suffered a real injury with real losses: more treatment, a worse outcome, lost income, pain, or a death in the family.

Ohio adds a gatekeeping requirement. A malpractice lawsuit must be filed with an affidavit of merit, a sworn statement from a qualified medical expert who has reviewed the records and states that the standard of care was breached and that the breach caused the injury. Without it, the case is subject to dismissal, although a court can grant a short extension for good cause. That is why we do not file until an expert in the right specialty has looked at everything, and why the first weeks of a case are spent gathering records rather than drafting a complaint.

Getting Your Medical Records

You have a legal right to a copy of your own medical records, and a provider cannot refuse to release them because you are considering a claim. Requesting them early matters: records can be amended, and the version that exists before a provider knows a claim is coming is the version we want.

Once we have them, we do not read them alone. We send the complete chart, imaging, lab results, medication records, and nursing notes to independent medical experts in the relevant specialty. They tell us whether the care fell below the standard, where in the timeline it happened, and what the outcome should have been. That review is what turns a bad experience into a case that can be filed.

Akron-Area Hospitals and Health Systems

Summit County is served by large hospital systems, community hospitals, urgent care and emergency locations, outpatient surgical centers, and private practices. KNR handles claims involving all of them. Where the care happened does not change the standard the provider had to meet; it changes who the defendants are, what insurance is available, and how the records are kept.

Hospital cases involve corporate policies, staffing, and the employment status of the doctors involved. Urgent care and emergency room cases often turn on triage and discharge decisions made under time pressure. Surgical center and private practice cases usually focus on one provider’s judgment. Our Akron medical malpractice lawyers have worked all of these settings, and we know where the records live in each one.

Our Medical Malpractice Legal Team Will:

• Investigar, recabar pruebas y identificar a los responsables.
• Obtain your complete medical records and have them reviewed by independent experts in the right specialty.
• Entrevista a testigos, profesionales sanitarios y expertos para demostrar cómo se ha visto afectada tu vida.
• Ponte en contacto con la aseguradora, aclara quién es el responsable y intenta conseguir la máxima indemnización.
• Determine your medical injury’s full and fair value – what you lost and deserve.
• Te mantendremos informado y te haremos partícipe. Puedes contactar con KNR por teléfono, mensaje de texto, correo electrónico o Zoom.
• Defiende tus derechos y, si es necesario, lleva tu caso ante los tribunales.
• Never charge you upfront. If there is no recovery, there is no cost.

Akron Medical Malpractice FAQs

Talk to an Akron Medical Malpractice Lawyer Today

Call (330) 869-9007 or 1-800-HURT-NOW for a free, confidential consultation. There is no fee unless we win.