What the Doctor Doesn’t Know…

If like me you don’t go to the doctors as often as you should, it is fair to say that when you get ill it’s because you have neglected your body. It might be lack of sleep, poor diet, catching a cold by accident, but neglecting the GP is to neglect your medical condition. So what happens then when the medical professionals we trust to help us get better fall short of their responsibilities?


The doctors and nurses in the UK are among the best medical practitioners in the world; highly educated, provided with some of the best facilities available etc, but very occasionally there is a slip in protocol. This is defined as ‘Medical Negligence’ and it happens when a medical professional abuses the patient. This results in the patient being worse off by the end of the treatment, and can result in deep depression in patients, anxiety, trauma, and even death if the malpractice was severe enough.

Medical Negligence Claims
Medical negligence claims, as defined nice and clearly by Claims.com here, depend on the claimant’s condition afterwards. If the patient’s life has been significantly damaged by the medical professional, the claimant can receive compensation. While financial compensation certainly helps, many sufferers of medical negligence argue that their claim is not for money, but for prevention reasons.

Channel 4 released this post on ‘The Search For Justice’ which says that the UK suffers over 850,000 medical accidents in hospitals every year. While this is a staggering number of hospital accidents, there are even more cases happening all around the UK where the patient does not file for medical negligence, and suffers as a result. Many cases go on unclaimed for fear of damaging the doctor’s career, and as a result, nothing is done to prevent the same thing happening to someone else.

Well, well, well
Without getting too anxious, try reading some of these medical horror stories from AskMen.com in their ‘Top 10 Scary Medical Malpractice Cases’. These are of course the most extreme cases of medical negligence: sometimes only a small action can lead to a big problem. One of the most dangerous things about medical negligence is not simply the professional’s misconduct, it is the patient’s lack of action.

Medical negligence is widely regarded as a nightmare that will never happen to you, but for the people who have suffered from it, justice is the only cure.