Have you recently been injured in a medical setting and now want to make a compensation claim for the damages you have sustained?

Sometimes it can be murky as to who is responsible for actually causing the damages.

This, of course, leads to problems in securing payouts.

Everyone will be trying to duck and dive how much involvement they had.

Naturally, no one wants to help you if it means their name suffering as a result of your compensation.

However, determining who is to blame is absolutely vital.

The person at fault will be the party responsible for paying damage compensation to you through settlement negotiations or a court order.

Who actually gets to decide who is at fault (liable) for the damages or accident?

Although each case is slightly different, if you are injured, you can expect your dependable medical solicitors in Manchester to investigate the case to try and determine who is at fault and therefore liable to compensate you.

Is it pretty regular for parties that are liable to have liability insurance.

When insurance companies are involved it often means that they will be settling payments and settlement negotiations.

This will be either in or out of court depending on your case.

If there is an insurance company in place – they will likely hold their own investigation.

As they are the people paying out they will want to be certain of what happened so they are not short changed themselves.

If no liability is assigned to either party through neither party accepting responsibility – litigation and a trial may have to happen for a judge to decide who is at fault.   

Where does negligence come into this?

Plenty of injury cases happen because someone acted negligently towards you.

Negligence can be defined as an action that does not meet the standard of care expected from a person which, in turn, causes harm to you.

An example of this could be a dentist chatting about the news to a colleague, slipping with a surgical tool and cutting your mouth open – the dentist had a duty of care to protect you while under their service.

You have now sustained a large cut on your mouth and, clearly, the dentist was not acting how they should have.

To prove another party was acting negligently some things have to be in place to someone liable.

These are:

A duty of care – there cannot be an ‘implied’ duty of care as the criteria is a legal duty of care to you if you were injured by another person. An easy example of this is a General Practitioner (GP) has a duty of care to prescribe you medicine(s) that will not cause you unnecessary harm.

Breaching this duty – For the case to be negligent, the duty of care has to be proven to be breached. In order to breach this duty of care, the person at blame for the injury must have done something like be distracted by a phone call when prescribing you your medicine. The GP should have been focussing on you and which medicine you need to improve your health, not their phone call.

Cause – The person (defendant) whom you are claiming against must be the reason why you were injured. This can be reasonably easy once it has been proven a breach of a duty of care was made. Let’s say for the sake of a non medical argument that the person you are claiming against collided with the side of your car and caused you whiplash – the defendant would clearly be at fault for your damages caused.

Damage – You must show that you were damaged, harmed or suffered some sort of loss as a result of the incident. Again, this is usually the easy thing to prove as this is why you are outraged and want to make a claim against a person or company. Damages cover a wide spectrum – from loss of income, emotional, physical and mental damages, travel charges, the need for extra medical support and so on.

Other measures – Depending on the situation there might be other ways or reasons of proving fault. This is very situational.

This is the way that negligence is determined within a case.

We hope this gives readers a better understanding of what it takes to successfully prove that someone else acted negligently towards you and therefore show that you have a claim.

This week’s news is about the developing situation with AWH Solicitors. The article details how the Manchester law firm is introducing two new specialisms. AWH will be working on industrial disease cases as well as medical claims cases. Experts are saying that these two industries will continue to grow so this is one of the major reasons that the company are adding these services into their range. The two industries have been growing for the last few years as it is.