Samaritan Medical Center

Samaritan Medical Center is a community hospital with 290 beds located in Watertown, New York. It has more than 180 doctors in 40 different specialties. It has more than 2,000 employees and serves both civilians and the military. If you seek out medical care from a doctor, you assume that the doctor will follow the accepted standards and practices of the medical community. There is a lot of information that licensed physicians and nurses know that laypeople do not. Unfortunately, sometimes doctors and the medical centers where they work make errors that cause significant harm and injuries to patients. If you suspect that you suffered harm because of a surgical error, a misdiagnosis, a failure to monitor a condition, or another form of malpractice at Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, you should consult the Watertown medical malpractice attorneys at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano.

Many patients are not prepared for the medical bills, lost wages, out-of-pocket expenses, and need for replacement services that may be occasioned by the errors of a medical center or their health care providers. Medical malpractice happens when health care providers or medical centers do not follow the accepted standards and practices of the medical community. You will need to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that you were owed a professional duty of care, a health care provider at Samaritan Medical Center failed to live up to the applicable professional duty of care in diagnosing, monitoring, or treating you, and you suffered damages as a result.

Breaches of the professional duty of care occur in many different ways, depending on the context of diagnosis or treatment. For example, there may be a breach of the professional duty of care if you went to the doctor with certain symptoms, but an impending stroke was misdiagnosed, and as a result, you suffered greater harm than you would have had the stroke been caught at the time that you went to the doctor. For another example, there may be a breach of the professional duty of care if a doctor does not list lung cancer as a differential diagnosis. As a result, no tests for lung cancer may be performed, and lung cancer may not be diagnosed, resulting in the patient progressing to stage 4 and dying.

Sometimes a breach of a professional duty of care harms a fetus. If your baby suffers birth injuries as a result of a doctor's mistakes during labor, our attorneys may be able to help you file a lawsuit for damages. Mistakes that may result in a birth injury include failing to properly monitor gestational diabetes during a pregnancy, failing to notice fetal distress, failing to perform a C-section when it is indicated, failing to monitor acidosis to prevent oxygen deprivation, or improperly using forceps.

One type of medical malpractice lawsuit is an informed consent lawsuit. An informed consent lawsuit may be brought when a health care provider does not provide the information that you need to make an informed decision about whether to undergo a medical procedure, and you are injured during the procedure because the risk of which you were not warned happens. Your lawyer will need to prove that you would not have had the medical procedure performed had you been informed of the dangers.

Usually, it is important to retain one or more credible experts even before filing a medical malpractice lawsuit. The expert will need to review medical records and other evidence to determine what the professional standard of care was, whether it was breached, and whether the breach caused injuries or worsened the harm. Your attorney will need to file a certificate under Rule 3012-a in connection with the medical expert before suing.

If you were injured because of medical malpractice by a health care provider at Samaritan Medical Center, our law firm may be able to help you recover damages from the responsible parties. DeFrancisco & Falgiatano represents injured patients in Watertown, Syracuse, Rochester, Binghamton, Auburn, Elmira, Norwich, Cortland, Delhi, Herkimer, Watertown, Lowville, Oneida, Wampsville, Utica, Canandaigua, Oswego, Cooperstown, Ithaca, and Lyons. Call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form.