Malpractice Prevention Advice and Guidance
Prevention of medical malpractice should involve taking reasonable steps to try to ensure medical errors do not occur and to ensure doctors providing care are well trained. Medical professionals receive continuing education and should ensure they are keeping up-to-date on the latest developments within their field. In addition, clinics and hospitals should carefully vet the doctors they hire. Unfortunately, even under the best of circumstances, errors can be made. The goal needs to be minimizing errors and prevention malpractice whenever possible.
Risk management programs can be invaluable in helping clinics and care providers identify vulnerabilities in their caregiving process and to try to prevent malpractice. As part of a successful malpractice prevention effort, steps to take should include:
- Auditing: The standards and practices employed by doctors and staff should be periodically reviewed. There are third-party services specializing in risk management that can perform an outside audit to identify areas where improvement is necessary.
- Training: All staff members should be regularly trained, including nurses and support staff. If mistakes are made by non-physicians, the doctor and clinic or hospital can still ultimately be held responsible for errors made by staff members. Regular and ongoing training is paramount to reducing risk.
- Effective use of electronic health records: Federal legislation geared toward digitizing health records has provided financial incentives for care providers to switch to electronic health records. When used effectively, electronic health records can improve communication and reduce the potential for error.
Clinical practice guidelines can also be an invaluable tool for medical malpractice prevention. Clinical practice guidelines establish appropriate treatment protocols that can help to cut down on the use of defensive medicine. Doctors routinely order unnecessary tests to try to reduce liability, but these tests can sometimes cause more harm than good because of false positives or potential mistakes made during testing. Clinical practice guidelines can reduce the need for unnecessary testing and improve patient care while providing “safe harbors,” as the guidelines can help doctors defend against lawsuits.
Getting Help from a Charlotte Medical Malpractice Lawyer
Even when the best efforts are made, medical care providers can still sometimes make mistakes and should be held accountable for them. A medical malpractice attorney in Charlotte can help victims to determine if care providers followed best practices or if they provided substandard care that makes them liable for resulting losses. Call Brown Moore & Associates, PLLC at 800-948-0577, or contact us online for help.
