Knoxville Medical Malpractice Attorney
Handling the Full Range of Health Care Liability Actions in Knoxville and East Tennessee
The Knoxville medical malpractice attorney at Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina & Stewart, PLLC, excels in helping victims of medical errors across the spectrum of health care liability actions in Tennessee, including medical malpractice, and nursing home malpractice. These complex and highly technical claims require a special level of skill and expertise to uncover medical malpractice and explain it in a way that proves your case to a judge or jury.
What is Medical Malpractice?
Known as health care liability actions in Tennessee, medical malpractice is a claim alleging that a health care provider caused an injury related to the provision of health care services or the failure to provide health care services. In Tennessee law, the term “health care provider” includes doctors, hospitals, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacy techs, orderlies, and others related to the provision of medical or health care services.
Medical malpractice can include any of the following types of errors, for example:
- Surgical Mistakes – making an incision on the wrong part of the body, causing nerve damage, performing the wrong surgery on the wrong side of the body or the wrong patient, leaving surgical tools inside the patient
- Misdiagnosis – failing to diagnose cancer, unreasonably delaying a proper diagnosis, misdiagnosing the patient’s condition, misreading lab results, failing to take a patient’s medical history
- Birth Injuries – improper use of forceps, delayed c-section, failure to monitor maternal or fetal health, resulting in fetal injury, including Cerebral Palsy, Erb’s palsy, shoulder dystocia, brachial plexus injury and potentially death
- Medication Errors – prescribing or administering the wrong medication or dosage, negligent delivery of medication through injection, failing to check for drug interactions or patient allergies
- Anesthesia Mistakes – delivering too much or too little anesthetic, dangerously prolonged sedation, negligent or improper intubation, failure to monitor vital signs, failure to monitor and assess the anesthesia vaporizer machine and/or patient intra-operatively
- Hospital-Acquired Infections – failing to sanitize hospital surfaces, failing to sterilize medical instruments, failing to wash hands before handling patient, failing to sterilize site before injection or catheterization, negligent wound care
- Lack of Informed Consent – failing to inform the patient about the risks and benefits of a procedure, failing to discuss alternatives to the proposed treatment, performing a procedure or treatment that goes beyond the bounds of a properly obtained informed consent
- Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant Malpractice – prescribing medication without proper authority, working without supervision, working without a required written protocol, performing services beyond the range of competence and skill
- Hospital Malpractice – failing to supervise staff, failing to have written protocols in place, negligent training, understaffing, failing to clean surfaces and instruments
- Nursing Home Malpractice – physical abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, neglect, bedsores, malnutrition, improper use of restraints, medication errors, failure to diagnose or consult a doctor
Anatomy of a Knoxville Medical Malpractice Claim
Tennessee medical malpractice law requires the plaintiff to provide pre-suit notice to the doctor or hospital that they are about to be named as a defendant in a health care liability action. The law is very specific and detailed about what must be included in this notice and how it has to be served on the defendant. This notice gives the potential defendant 60 days to gather relevant medical records and other information about the claim and hopefully resolve the matter before a lawsuit is filed. Properly filing this notice also extends the one-year statute of limitations imposed on health care liability actions in Tennessee, giving the plaintiff an extra 120 days to decide whether to file a lawsuit or not.
Every bad outcome in a hospital or doctor’s office is not the result of negligence, and the fact of an injury alone does not create a presumption that the doctor or hospital was negligent. Instead, the plaintiff bears the burden of proving:
- The recognized standard of acceptable professional practice applicable to the defendant (i.e., the “Standard of Care”);
- The defendant acted with less than ordinary and reasonable care or failed to act with ordinary and reasonable care (i.e., they “deviated” from the Standard of Care); and
- As a proximate result of the defendant’s negligent act or omission, the plaintiff suffered injuries which would not otherwise have occurred.
Proving these facts typically requires testimony from medical experts. Tennessee law specifies the requirements for a qualified expert witness in a health care liability claim.
After a period of litigation known as discovery, where both sides gain access to important medical information about the injury and why it happened, the parties can hopefully agree on an appropriate amount of compensation and settle the matter. If not, the case proceeds to trial where it is litigated to a jury. Attorney Michael Brezina has extensive trial experience representing both plaintiffs and defendants in Knoxville and East Tennessee medical malpractice claims. Whether your case settles or goes to trial, Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina & Stewart, PLLC, has the right set of skills and experience to ably represent you and get results.
Tennessee Medical Malpractice FAQs
Below are answers to some frequently asked questions we hear at Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina, & Stewart, PLLC, as we help patients and the families of patients who were injured or killed due to medical negligence in Knoxville or East Tennessee. If you have other questions or need immediate assistance with a health care liability claim, please call Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina, & Stewart, PLLC, at 865-500-3121. Your call is free, and we won’t charge any fee until after we are successful in your case.
Q. What does it take to be a medical “expert” in Tennessee medical malpractice cases?
ATo qualify as a medical expert witness in Tennessee, your witness must:
- Hold a medical license in Tennessee or a bordering state;
- Be licensed in a profession or specialty area which makes the expert’s testimony relevant to the case at hand; and
- Be licensed during the year preceding the date when the injury or negligence occurred.
The court can waive these requirements if the appropriate witness would otherwise not be available. At Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina & Stewart, PLLC, we work with a network of medical experts in many fields. In addition, attorney Michael Brezina works closely with highly respected physician and attorney, Dr. Tucker Montgomery, in many medical malpractice cases.
Q. What kinds of compensation can I recover for medical malpractice?
A. Financial compensation for an injury, known in the law as “compensatory damages,” includes both economic and non-economic damages. Economic damages are actual economic losses incurred by the injured patient. These include the costs of reasonable and necessary medical care to deal with the harm done, rehabilitation services, custodial care if the negligence caused long-term or permanent disability, loss of services, loss of earned income and loss of earning capacity.
Non-economic damages refer to compensation for harm, such as the victim’s pain and suffering, scarring or disfigurement, disability, loss of enjoyment of life, and loss of consortium (intimate marital relations) due to the injury inflicted by the doctor or hospital. Non-economic damages are capped in Tennessee at $750,000, or $1 million if the injury was catastrophic. These limits don’t apply if the malpractice was intentional or resulted from the medical provider’s intoxication by alcohol or drugs, or if the doctor or hospital tried to hide their mistakes from the patient.
Q. Can I get punitive damages for medical malpractice?
A. As opposed to compensatory damages which are meant to compensate you for the harm done to you, punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for especially bad behavior. In Tennessee, punitive damages are limited to cases where the defendant acted recklessly, knowingly, maliciously, or intentionally. In addition, your case for punitive damages has to be proven by “clear and convincing evidence,” which is harder to prove than your case for compensatory damages, which only needs to be proven by a “preponderance of the evidence.”
Punitive damages are hard to prove in most personal injury cases, and they are especially rare in medical malpractice cases. Examples of conduct that might justify punitive damages include a doctor who performs surgery while intoxicated, a doctor who performs an operation that the doctor knows he or she is incompetent to perform, or a doctor who performs an unnecessary surgery with the intent to defraud insurance or Medicare.
Tennessee law places a cap on punitive damages at the greater of $500,000 or double the amount of compensatory damages awarded. This cap has been held unconstitutional by a Federal Court interpreting Tennessee law, but the Tennessee Supreme Court has not directly ruled on the matter, so the constitutionality of the punitive damages cap in Tennessee remains unclear.
Q. How long do I have to file a medical malpractice claim?
A. The standard deadline to file a lawsuit based on a personal injury in Tennessee is one year, and this one-year statute of limitations applies to health care liability actions as well. However, special rules apply to medical malpractice claims that don’t apply to other personal injury claims. For instance, you might not discover the malpractice at the moment it happens. In these cases, you have one year from the date you discover the injury, up to three years from the negligent act or omission. If the doctor or hospital tried to hide their mistake from you, you have one year from the date of discovery no matter how long after the event. This exception also applies if doctors negligently leave a foreign object in your body after surgery; you have one year from the date of discovery to file a claim, regardless of when the mistake happened.
Whenever you suspect you were harmed by medical negligence, contact a medical malpractice attorney as soon as possible. In Knoxville and East Tennessee, call Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina, & Stewart, PLLC, at 865-500-3121. There is no fee until after we are successful in recovering compensation for you.
Free Medical Malpractice Case Evaluation at Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina & Stewart, PLLC, in Knoxville
If you believe that you or a family member were harmed by medical malpractice, call Reynolds, Atkins, Brezina & Stewart, PLLC, at 865-500-3121 for a no-cost consultation with a skilled and experienced Knoxville medical malpractice attorney. There is no fee unless we win your case.
