When a child is injured at birth due to medical negligence, discovering who may be liable can often be a difficult task. Parents, guardians, attorneys and experts must review the medical records to see what went wrong and when to be sure that liability is placed against the proper parties.

Common birth injury cases

The most common birth injury cases involve brain injury or dystocia, which generally means that the child birth process was abnormal and can result in a host of injuries. However, injuries in these cases affect more than just the child and can be very complex from a legal standpoint. Jeff Milman, an attorney who has been practicing medical negligence law for 26 years and member of the Advocate Law Group, explained. “Birth injury cases affect the parents and require multiple experts. It requires a good sum of money to retain experts and prosecute and it requires a very, very, very experienced lawyer to handle these types of cases.”

Milman provided the following details on the most common birth injuries and who might be liable:

Brain injuries. Brain injury – or anoxic brain injury, what they call hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy is very common. The claims in those cases are usually that the physician or the medical staff failed to properly monitor the birth process via the fetal monitoring strips and order a caesarean section in a timely fashion.

Dystocia. Another type of case we see are where there is a vaginal delivery and the physician and the staff failed to properly help the baby down the canal such that the baby is born with dystocia which can affect palsy and a host of other things. There are also death cases and cases where there was improper genetic screening and of course, the baby is born with a genetic problem.

Vicarious liability issues

Vicarious liability is a legal term that says that someone is responsible for the acts of another and can be an important factor in birth injury cases. Milman explained the term and provided examples. “If I’m an employer and my employee’s running an errand for me and gets in a car accident, I’m vicariously responsible for the employee even though I did nothing wrong. In birth injury cases, you’ll mostly find that the doctors at private hospitals are independent contractors but the nurses are employees of the hospital. So, the hospital would be vicariously liable for the acts of the nurse.”

“If it’s Kaiser, for example, then both the doctors and nurses are employees of Kaiser and Kaiser would be responsible for their employees’ acts. If it’s federal, then the United States government is responsible for the conduct of the doctors and nurses at a Veteran’s Hospital.”

If your child was profoundly injured or died as the result of medical negligence, contact an attorney whose practice focuses in this area of law for help. To contact an experienced attorney near you, please click here.