Premature Discharge From Hospital

Sometimes doctors or hospitals make a decision to let a patient go home before he or she is truly stable enough to leave the medical setting. The consequences of a premature discharge from the hospital can be devastating. Sometimes these discharges result in preventable deaths. If you were injured or a loved one died because of a premature discharge from a hospital, you can consult the skilled Syracuse medical malpractice attorneys of DeFrancisco & Falgiatano.

Hospitals are often overcrowded. They may need to discharge their existing patients in order to allow new patients to come in. There may be insufficient beds, or not enough staff to accommodate patients. Often issues of overcrowding are the result of bad planning. If you were discharged from the hospital prematurely, and you were harmed as a result, you may be able to secure damages to compensate for your injuries. A doctor or facility could be responsible for not testing properly before discharge, for failing to schedule a necessary follow-up, for failing to adequately diagnose or treat you before discharging you, or for failing to ensure you were medically stable before letting you leave.

Not all mistakes a health care provider or facility makes can rise to the level of medical malpractice. In order to form the basis for a lawsuit, a provider’s actions or omissions need to fall below the accepted professional standard of care that they should have abided by under the circumstances, and also result in harm. Generally, the professional standard of care is the degree of care a similarly skilled health care provider would give to a patient under similar or the same circumstances. When a patient is discharged early, a court will look at whether a similarly situated health care provider in the same specialty have discharged the patient given his or her condition and other factors related to treatment. You may not have a claim related to premature discharge if you are readmitted to the hospital after going home, because being readmitted doesn’t necessarily mean you were injured because of a premature discharge. For example, if you come back with the same symptoms and get treatment you also could have gotten by staying in the hospital, and there are no increased treatments or problems, you won’t be able to establish a claim.

In a medical malpractice lawsuit, it is generally necessary to hire an expert witness to provide testimony. The expert is usually in the same field of medicine as the defendant. When you file a medical malpractice lawsuit in New York, you will also need to file a certificate regarding your attorney’s consultation with an expert.

If you can establish that premature hospital discharge constitutes medical malpractice in your case, you may be able to recover compensatory damages. The compensatory damages may include medical bills you wouldn’t have incurred were you not prematurely discharged, lost wages, loss of enjoyment, lost earning capacity arising out of the premature discharge, and pain and suffering.

There are situations in which a patient dies due to premature discharge from the hospital. In those instances, it may be possible to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Only the personal representative of the decedent’s estate can sue the hospital for wrongful death caused by premature discharge from the hospital. The personal representative will need to show: (1) death, (2) causation, (3) the decedent could have gone after damages had the death not happened, (4) survival by one or more people who were harmed as a result of the death, and (5) the estate can recover damages. Through the wrongful death lawsuit, the personal representative can seek damages for losses suffered by the decedent’s heirs, devisees, or beneficiaries, as well as the estate. The damages are held in trust for the family members to whom they belong.

If you were injured or a loved one died due to premature discharge from a hospital in or around Syracuse, you may be able to recover damages. The lawyers of DeFrancisco & Falgiatano provide knowledgeable counsel to patients injured in Syracuse, Rochester, and across Upstate New York, including in areas such as Canandaigua, Binghamton, Cooperstown, Ithaca, Auburn, Lyons, Elmira, Wampsville, Herkimer, Utica, Oneida, Lowville, Oswego, and Watertown. Call our firm at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form to learn more about your legal rights.