GP Negligence

If your GP does not provide a good standard of care which results in an injury, exacerbation of a problem or illness then we would suggest that you consider making a claim. GPs have to respect guidelines set in the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and a failure to follow them may result in a situation of negligent treatment or diagnosis and the patient can suffer as a result. The level of compensation is extremely varied, this is simply because of the scale of the problem the negligence has caused, pre-existing issues, whether the negligence has shortened life etc. As a general rule, you have 3 years to bring such a claim.

Common GP negligence claims include:

 

Failure to correctly diagnose 

It may be that your GP failed to diagnose things properly such as: -

• Lack of duty of care in diagnosing a suitable treatment;
• Failure or reluctance to refer you to a specialist/hospital, or to arrange exploratory tests;
• They showed a lack in the expected standard of care through not conducting a medical examination; or
• They did not take your medical history into account.

 

Paperwork error

• Not reading your records leads them to have missed what would have been, in all likelihood, an indicator of the current problem (this is especially relevant regarding locum doctors who tend to treat what they see without checking a patient’s history); and
• As above but their negligence has resulted in a misdiagnosis of the issue.

 

Medication errors

Diagnosing the wrong dose, or not taking into account the patient’s medical history can lead to death in certain situations. If you are in any doubt about the medication, you have been prescribed, or you think that the GP did not pay attention to / did not know your medical history then you should check with the dispensing pharmacist before taking the medication, the national helpline (call 111) can give you advice over the telephone.

 

How we can help

One of the issues with diagnosis is that the GP will only have a limited amount of time to see you and has to diagnose with the symptoms that present themselves, these can lead to a rushed diagnosis to meet their workload, however this does not excuse them form their duty of care towards you. If there has been a clear error then we would suggest that we commission a review by a consultant specialist to review the GPs work. If they feel that there has been an error then we would forward this information to you and take your instructions. These consultants are privately contracted by us (and therefore their cost would be classed as a disbursement). To quantify the potential claim in regard to mental trauma we would suggest an additional report from our psychological team. We would hope that the other side would agree with our experts’ findings without any further costs or investigations and agree to a series of interim payments followed by a final settlement.

 

The claim will consider two types of damages:

• General damages- this compensates the victim for the pain and suffering endured, and for the loss of enjoyment of life as a result of the negligent act.
• Special damages- this compensates the victim for any personal costs incurred as a result of the negligent act. It can also cover any additional costs required in the future such as remedial surgery to remedy the mistake, mental suffering and so on.

 

To gain our assistance you need to open a case, this is done by taking advantage of our free consultation service, activated by the link at the top of the page, should you wish to start a case the caseworker will send you the suitable payment link. Please note your caseworker can only give generic advice, their role is to prepare your details for handling by our legal team and medical consultant and to act as your point of contact, they will also issue you with your Password and PIN, these will be needed to log onto your client dashboard. From your dashboard you will be able to manage and view every aspect of your case, upload documents, images, files etc.