Being in the hospital is never easy. It stops everything and depending on the severity of the problem you are facing, it can make you seriously think about what is really important in life. For those who don’t suffer from such a serious injury or illness, it can really slow down their life.
Regaining your health should take precedence over work-related problems (and in some cases, they are the cause of …). All of this has to happen as you face the struggle of limited income in the event you have to take time off from work and receive sick pay. The problems facing hospital stays are endless, and simply put, not an easy task to deal with.
Hospital treatment
Recently, I was in the hospital for a broken knee after falling (embarrassingly) from a curb onto the road and was told by several people that the compensation due was unrealistic. It wasn’t true, I just lost my steps while checking my phone. He just wasn’t looking where he was going. This, however, got me thinking. Has the world gone crazy? So it seems.
While in the hospital, I was told that I had broken my kneecap (cleanly, but I can assure you it did not feel clean) and I had torn my medial collateral ligament and quadriceps tendon. While I sound like he knows what I’m talking about, I can honestly tell you that I don’t know what this meant and I was in agony, I’m not even sure if that was really what I had done, but I do remember. be on that line.
They told me that I would not be able to use my knee properly for up to 8-12 weeks and I needed surgery to replace my kneecap. An absolute nightmare as you can imagine. Being told that I needed a new kneecap was concerning to say the least, and to make matters worse, after the surgery I had to go back in, as they had somehow managed to put the wrong size kneecap on me. the knee (the prosthesis was bad). measured incorrectly). However, on the bright side, I’m happy to say that after that, my knee is as good as new.
Say
Now what I learned during my hospital stay and following many people who told me was that medical malpractice claims were common and there were numerous attorneys who did not earn or pay fees that I could use. Since my surgery had been performed incorrectly, I understood that people were just taking care of me. In addition to this, I noticed a lot of marketing for the attorneys during my hospital stay, which was to be expected given the audience there. What struck me was, after researching it, there was a looming legality issue facing attorneys regarding their fees. This interested me a lot.
One of the growing problems in the last 17 years is the increase in medical malpractice claims (the article is taken from 2008) or similar. Defined as “inattention from a doctor, nurse, and other health professionals,” it can range from late surgery to misdiagnoses. There are hundreds of law firms that specialize in these cases and it can be a daunting task to figure it out yourself if you have a case. Trust is always an issue in these situations, as you don’t know who to turn to and I wasn’t really particularly interested in pursuing a case.
Lawyers claim most of the losing party’s expenses if they win, that’s what we can all figure out. And, if they lose, you only pay what was originally agreed upon before going to trial (thus a win-win situation for attorneys), they get an agreed-upon fee if they lose to pay for themselves (after all, business is business) and is significantly higher if you win. I agreed with a team of lawyers to follow these lines and the only cost I would have to pay would be court costs in case we lose (and it would be 25% of my compensation if I win). The Telegraph reports that the end of the ‘no win, no pay’ culture is upon us with changes imminent.
Change of law
However, the part of the law that is about to change is the amount an attorney can claim to cover their cost. It has been absurd in the past. In one particular case, a lawyer claimed £ 83,000 for a court case in which his client received £ 1,000. At a total cost of £ 1.5 billion in 2015-2016, this law could not come in earlier and is expected to save the NHS £ 45 million a year. It gets technical, but in short, it means that the attorneys are affected more than the client. The knock-on effect of this, which I can predict, will be that, in the short term, cases like mine, where I am expected to win, are dealt with quickly, efficiently, and as a “priority” for attorneys. Once this bill is passed, I would imagine that the time it takes from start to finish is longer or someone of lower rank in the companies will take care of the cases (since they can only claim a fixed amount for the case). It may be an initial trend that “no win, no fee” cases are initial practice for attorneys.
The statement by Andrew Foster, CEO of the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust sums it up perfectly: “ The introduction of a fixed recoverable cost for lower value claims would support a more proportionate payment to plaintiff attorneys, which together with the System improvements should make things faster and better for patients. This seems fair and appropriate to acknowledge that this is all coming from the NHS pot. Less money spent on legal costs will mean more to improve patient care locally. ‘
Brilliantly, it looks like there will be more money for the NHS and less for lawyers who overcharge the losing party for their already overrated service.
Return to basic
When speaking to someone in the industry, it seemed common practice prior to the 1999 Access to Justice Act was to only accept cases that they were confident of winning and select the cases that they knew could win and double their capacity. costs to make up for the cases they couldn’t. It could be that this is the case again in the future, but in reality, it could be a good thing that the lower ‘ambulance chasers’ in court reduce the amount of time lost to the system, but on the opposite side, the costs. for lawyers they could increase. The reduction in the ‘no win, no pay’ fees that lawyers can charge is a positive move and I am predicting that the 25% ‘win fee’ could even be increased to make up for the lawyers’ lost earnings.
https://mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/clinical-negligence/#.WUjY9uvyvDc
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/9959646/End-of-no-win-no-fee-lawsuits.html