Medical malpractice is a highly nuanced area of personal injury law. To understand what it is, it is important to understand what it is not. The law recognizes that doctors and other medical practitioners are human.

As such, they cannot be expected to successfully cure every patient they treat. A negative outcome does not necessarily indicate medical malpractice or negligence. Rather, medical providers are held to what is known as the “accepted standard of care,” or simply the “standard of care.”

This means that medical professionals and institutions must provide all patients with the same level of care that another qualified practitioner or institution would provide in the same or similar circumstances. Specifically, to follow the standard of care, they must:

• Do everything another medical professional or institution would do when treating a patient in similar circumstances
• Refrain from doing anything another medical professional or institution would not do when treating a patient in similar circumstances

Different medical providers are held to different standards of care. For example, emergency room doctors are required to make quick decisions in high-risk situations; as such, they are held to a different standard of care than a general practitioner who sees patients by appointment for routine, non-life-threatening medical conditions.

One cannot reasonably expect the exact same treatment from an emergency room doctor as a primary care physician, and vice versa.