UK Psychiatric Care – Medical Negligence Solicitor – Injury Compensation Claims

A UK medical negligence compensation claim solicitor deals with applications for damages against UK healthcare professionals for personal injury and loss caused as a result of negligent psychiatric care. It is to your advantage, in order to preserve your legal right to compensation, to make contact with a UK personal injury solicitor as soon as possible for advice on a medical negligence compensation claim as a result of negligent psychiatric care.

Risk

While it’s true that psychiatry is an inexact science, there are ways that a psychiatrist or psychiatric healthcare provider can do their job well and there are ways they can do the job poorly. Patients with psychiatric problems not only are in emotional anguish, they are often at risk for harming themselves or others in the midst of their illness.

Evaluation

Much of the evaluation of psychiatric patients involves talking to the patient and getting their responses. It also involves observing the patient—both during the interview and while observing them in a psychiatric facility. These are the ways a doctor or healthcare provider can make judgments about the care of the patient, whether they should be discharged and what kinds of treatment, such as medications, they might need.

Inadequate Treatment

Psychiatrists can make mistakes in under-treating psychiatric patients. They can fail to give them antipsychotic medications when they are clearly psychotic, or they can fail to give them antidepressants when all evidence suggests that depression is present. The doctor can misunderstand certain words or actions on the patient’s part and can treat a depressive disorder with antipsychotics or can fail to treat a manic-depressive disorder with the proper medications for bipolar disorder. This can lead to a discharged patient who is just as sick as they were prior to the intervention but now they have a prescription for dangerous medication that they can use incorrectly or not at all.

Suicide

Psychiatrists must be on the lookout for evidence of suicidality. This can show up in the interview with the patient, observation of peri-suicidal behavior, or from writing the patient has done as part of writing assignments or written information between therapist and patient. If suicidality is not picked up on or is ignored, the patient can be sent home from a psychiatry visit or from a psychiatric facility with heightened suicidality because their pleas for help have been ignored by psychiatric staff.

Suicidality is a serious problem because a number of people do leave a psychiatric facility with ongoing suicidal feelings—some of which they act on in suicidal gestures that can leave them with lasting consequences or with a completed suicide from which they cannot return. Caregivers need to respond both to direct statements of a patient’s suicidality as well as to suicidal behaviors or indications from others who know the individual that the suicide risk is great. Such a person must be kept in a locked and secure facility until antidepressant medications work or until he or she is deemed safe to leave or is leaving for a safe facility.

Hostility

Patients can sometimes express feelings of hostility that extend toward hurting or killing others. Such a patient is considered to be homicidal and should be kept in a locked facility away from the person or persons he or she is considered to be a danger towards. Ongoing therapy to help the person ease their feelings of hostility must be done in order to safeguard the health and welfare of the other individual or individuals.

Self Harm

If doctors, nurses or other staff people know that a patient is harmful to themselves or others, there should be an automatic hold on the person and possibly an indefinite hold if they are continuing to be a danger. It is the responsibility of the staff at the facility the person is staying at to treat the patient with the proper medications and therapy to make the person safe enough to leave the facility for the sake of their own health and the health of others who may be in danger because of the actions of the mentally ill individual.

Qualified Legal Advice

Specialist medical negligence solicitors offer free impartial advice on clinical compensation claims. In most cases medical negligence solicitors are able to deal with all of the legal work at no cost. If you would like free advice with no further obligation contact a specialist UK lawyer who will tell you how best to proceed to protect your right to claim compensation for personal injury.

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