Nurses who harm somebody through unreasonable incompetence have committed nursing malpractice. The thing is, you can't go after the nurse directly in a malpractice lawsuit. So what are your options when it comes to getting the financial compensation you deserve? Keep reading to find out.

First off, we have to clarify what nursing malpractice is, because not every mistake is going to be full-blown malpractice. An error is malpractice only if the error injured the patient, and the error is not one that a reasonably competent nurse would have made in those circumstances. Many harmful errors can be considered malpractice then, and these are three of the most common instances of such malpractice:

• Not responding to an urgent situation. That is, if a nurse fails to speak up or take action, then they could be guilty of malpractice, such as if a nurse does not tell a doctor about something they see on a monitor, or if they do not give emergency medicine to a patient.
• Inflicting harm through equipment. This could include situations where a nurse fails to count sponges correctly, leading to a sponge being left inside a patient. This could also apply to situations when a nurse drops equipment on a patient or burns them.
• Making mistakes in medication. This could include when a nurse goofs a physician's orders, or if they miss a vein and inject medicine into a muscle, or if they give medicine to the wrong patient.

Who can you sue for nursing malpractice?

As you cannot sue a nurse directly, it is possible for the attending doctor or the hospital to be held liable for nursing malpractice. If you win your medical malpractice claim, whichever party is responsible would owe you financial compensation.

When a hospital will be faulted:

• The nurse is a hospital employee,
• who was on the job when the patient was harmed through negligence, and
• an independent doctor could not have done anything about the malpractice

The attending doctor could be liable if:

• The doctor was there when the negligence occurred, and
• they could have counteracted the negligence

Most doctors are independent contractors, and thus they are not technically employees of the hospital, thus a doctor is a distinct party from a hospital in a malpractice case.

Apart from some more complicated issues when it comes to determining who is at fault, a nursing malpractice case is much like any other medical malpractice case. This means that you will probably need a medical expert who could establish for the court what a competent nurse's actions would have been in your circumstance, except in obvious cases. If a nurse injected the wrong patient, that's pretty clear cut negligence. And you could be owed damages for your pain and suffering, medical bills, lost income, and more.

If you want to know more about whether or not you have a medical malpractice lawsuit, and how much your claim could be worth, call a medical malpractice lawyer from our directory today!