A critical aspect to ensuring patients receive quality care and preventing avoidable harm is making sure that health care teams communicate. This is especially true in complex medical situations such as difficult labors and deliveries. The failure to communicate may have dire consequences for a mother and child, leading to potentially life long birth injuries, and in the worst case, death.
There are many instances where an injury during labor or delivery could have been avoided had problems been observed, properly diagnosed and quickly and correctly resolved. Mistakes by a doctor, nurse or other medical personnel, where they have failed to live up to the accepted standards of their profession, constitute medical malpractice.
One example of this is where the failure to adequately monitor and/or communicate the urgency concerning a difficult delivery leads to a delay in performing an emergency C-Section. Signs may exist that an infant is experiencing fetal distress and the health care team must act quickly. However, a failure to communicate this concern or the failure to take immediate action may result in the child being deprived of precious oxygen and blood flow to its brain, a circumstance that has been linked to birth injuries including cerebral palsy.
Too often parents do not know where to turn when they suspect medical mistakes or errors harmed their child. At Bostwick & Peterson, our dedicated team of Los Angeles birth injury lawyers can help assess a situation and provide comfort and advice to parents dealing with potential medical negligence. For more information, please contact our experienced Los Angeles personal injury lawyers.