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Proving medical malpractice is notoriously difficult. That’s because every patient is different, and bad outcomes can happen even when doctors, surgeons, and other healthcare providers are thorough, attentive, and follow all protocols and guidelines when treating patients.
In addition to being difficult to prove, doctors, surgeons, and other providers rarely admit to malpractice when it happens. However, they often apologize to patients for various unpleasant aspects of medical treatment. In some patients’ eyes, these apologies may constitute an admission of malpractice, especially if they suffered adverse or unexpected outcomes during treatment.
If your or your loved one’s healthcare provider apologized after a poor health outcome, here’s what you need to know about their apology and whether it can be used as evidence in a medical malpractice claim.
Ohio's apology statute, Ohio Revised Code Section 2317.43, is a legal provision designed to encourage open communication between healthcare providers and patients by ensuring that certain statements made by healthcare providers cannot be used as evidence of liability in a medical malpractice lawsuit.
The key points to know about Ohio's apology statute are:
Doctors or surgeons might apologize to patients for bad outcomes in various situations, often as a part of compassionate communication or to express empathy.
While the specific circumstances for apologies from healthcare providers to patients can vary, common scenarios where apologies occur in healthcare settings can include:
In many of these above scenarios, an apology does not necessarily mean the doctor or surgeon made a mistake or is legally at fault. It can be a way of expressing empathy and maintaining a trusting, communicative doctor-patient relationship.
As mentioned above, Ohio’s apology statute protects doctors, surgeons, and other healthcare providers from having sympathetic statements made to patients used against them. However, it does not protect them from having sympathetic statements that include admissions of fault used against them.
For instance, if during their apology, the healthcare provider explicitly acknowledges a mistake or negligence, such as saying, "I made an error during the procedure," or "It was my fault that the medication was incorrect," those statements can be interpreted as admissions of liability.
In such cases, the apology goes beyond expressing sympathy or regret for the patient's suffering and directly admits responsibility for the harm or injury. It's these types of admissions, rather than general expressions of sorrow or regret, that can be used as evidence in a medical malpractice lawsuit.
Bad outcomes are unfortunately more common than many people think in the medical field. And while most of those bad outcomes are due to factors that doctors, surgeons, and other healthcare providers couldn’t possibly have foreseen or prevented, some of them are due to negligence.
If you suspect that your or your loved one’s bad outcome is due to negligence, whether or not the healthcare provider admitted to it, we want to hear from you. The Cleveland medical malpractice attorneys at Nurenberg, Paris, Heller & McCarthy have decades of experience building successful malpractice claims for countless injured patients, and we want to hear your story, too. Contact us anytime for a free case review to learn how we can help.
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