Millions of Australians place great trust in our doctors, hospitals and healthcare providers in the hope of receiving the best healthcare possible. In the end, your health or the health of your loved one is probably the most important thing in the world. However, even the most skilled doctors and medical professionals make mistakes and fail to exercise reasonable skill and care. This often results in misdiagnosis, delay in diagnosis and progression of your medical condition resulting in worse outcomes or death.  This is known as medical negligence or medical malpractice. Medical negligence claims, by their nature, are complex, however, with our expert knowledge and careful and thorough preparation of your claim, we will help you recover the compensation you deserve in your medical negligence claim. Just like we did it for Robert and his family.

Helping Robert and his family

Robert was 45 years old when her presented to a hospital emergency department with severe neck pain and fever. Robert’s symptoms were caused by a developing spinal infection in the tissues that surround the spinal cord and nerve roots. This condition was not considered as the cause of Robert’s symptoms by the doctors at the emergency department at the time of his presentation to hospital. At that time, Robert was diagnosed as having mechanical neck pain and sent home. As a result, the correct treatment, which consisted of commencement of appropriate antibiotic therapy and surgical drainage was significantly delayed by close to 3 days and appropriate surgery to drain or remove the spinal abscess was not performed in a timely manner. This led to Robert becoming an incomplete quadriplegic.  Robert and his family retained solicitors to investigate Robert’s claim but were advised that Robert had no case for compensation. It was at this point Robert called us (see our another lawyer told me I do not have a case, can you help? page).

How we helped Robert and his family?

Prior to his injury Robert was a builder, and his wife, Susan,  decided to stay home and look after their 2 young children with the intention of getting back to work. Following Robert suffering his injuries he approached one of the specialist medical negligence firms in Sydney, however, was advised that he did not have a case. This meant that Robert was not able to claim compensation for his injuries, which was devastating news for Robert and his family given his catastrophic injuries, which were likely to impact not only him but his entire family for the rest of their lives. When Robert and his family came to us, we discovered that the prior advice provided to them by their previous lawyers was wrong and that they had failed to investigate the issue of significant delay in commencement of appropriate antibiotic therapy and the delay in performance of decompression surgery to drain Robert’s spinal/epidural abscess.

We were able to successfully obtain evidence from a specialist in emergency medicine and an infectious diseases physician, necessary for Robert to make a medical negligence compensation claim.

In addition to Robert’s claim, we discovered that the lifestyle of his family had dramatically been impacted by Robert’s injuries and disabilities. Robert’s condition stopped Susan from working and caused her and their 2 children to suffer psychiatric/psychological injuries. We took the necessary steps to fully and completely understand the physical and emotional struggle both Robert and his family had been through, as well as the financial losses they had suffered.

We made a commitment to do everything possible to obtain the necessary evidence in support of not only Roberts’s claim, but also Susan’s, and their 2 children’s, claims for nervous shock. We looked beyond the obvious, took the time to carefully prepare their claims and invested significant effort to thoroughly understand the impact of Robert’s injuries on his day to day life and the day to day life of his family as well as our financial resources in order to prepare the claim.

We were able to successfully obtain evidence in support of not only Robert’s but, also, his family’s nervous shock claims. Despite the previous advice Robert received form his previous medical negligence lawyer, we were able to build a strong case Robert and his family, which ultimately settled out of court for millions of dollars.*

* in order to protect their privacy, client’s names and images as well as some of the facts have been changed. 

*Disclaimer: This is intended as general information only and not to be construed as legal advice. The above information is subject to changes over time. You should always seek professional advice before taking any course of action.*