If a patient dies from medical malpractice in a hospital, the family or the estate of the deceased can submit a wrongful death lawsuit. The laws in Florida enable a person’s estate to sue a medical facility so the beneficiaries can be awarded damages.
Therefore, if you are interested in filing this type of lawsuit, you need to speak to a wrongful death attorney in West Palm Beach, FL. Doing so will help you learn more about your rights in this respect.
Determining Negligence
A hospital can be held liable in one of various ways following a patient’s death. The two most common ways that the law recognizes negligence includes the following:
- Negligence caused by nurses, physicians, and other health providers that are employed by the medical facility.
- The medical facility’s own negligence in employing and supervising the employees or repairing or maintaining its equipment. The hospital can also be held negligent for managing the care within the facility.
If you speak to a wrongful death attorney, he or she will tell you that a hospital usually cannot be held liable for the negligence of a physician who saw a patient in its facility and who performed a procedure in that hospital. If the doctor was not an employee of the hospital, the hospital generally cannot be sued.
Independent Contractors
Usually, nurses and doctors are considered to be independent contractors. Therefore, if they are not employees, a medical facility normally cannot be held responsible for their actions. As a result, determining whether a medical professional is an independent contractor or an employee can become rather complex.
A wrongful death attorney must review matters such as the employment agreement between the hospital and physician and see how much control the medical facility has over the physician’s activities. As a basic rule, the more control a hospital has over the performance of an independent contractor, the more likely it is that the court will consider the doctor or medical professional an actual employee.
Needless to say, this can be difficult to prove on your own.
