Georgia Patients Denied Recovery For Medical Malpractice

Georgia medical malpractice cases have become increasingly difficult to bring as the legislature enacts more and more restrictive laws. A fact which many do not know is that patients injured by highly negligent actions in Georgia emergency departments have no right of recovery. This is due legislation which established a gross negligence standard which governing the actions of emergency room personnel.
This standard has been interpreted by the Georgia courts as requiring almost intentional conduct.
The extreme unfairness of this law is illustrated by a recent incident occurring at a VA hospital in Missouri. The VA hospital is under fire because it may have exposed more than 1,800 veterans to life-threatening diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
The John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis recently mailed letters to 1,812 veterans telling them they could contract hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after visiting the medical center for dental work.
The alert was caused by the failure to clean dental instruments properly. According to reports, dental technicians broke protocol by handwashing tools before putting them in cleaning machines.
The instruments were supposed to only be put in the cleaning machines. The handwashing started in February 2009 and went on until March of this year.
A similar event occurred recently at a California hospital which was forced to send letters to 3,400 patients who underwent colonoscopy and other similar procedures, informing the patients that there may be a potential of infection from items used and reused in the procedures.
This misconduct is totally unacceptable, yet in Georgia, patients exposed to these deadly diseases in an emergency room setting have no recourse.

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