A trip to the hospital or the emergency room is meant to improve your health or save your life, not leave you worse than when you started. Many patients are nervous when they go for treatment at large medical facilities, regardless of whether the visit was planned. You expect the doctors, nurses, and support staff to act quickly and follow a standard level of care. When your well-being deteriorates because of an error made by the hospital or emergency room doctors or staff, the effects can be devastating for your family’s well-being as well as your own.
If you or a loved one has suffered or been injured because of hospital or emergency room malpractice in the Tampa Bay area or elsewhere in Florida, you could be a victim of medical malpractice entitled to compensation for your injuries and losses. Contact a Tampa medical malpractice attorney from Wagner, McLaughlin & Whittemore to guide you through the complexities of a malpractice claim. We can help you obtain the compensation you deserve.
Call Today
813-225-4000
When hospital or emergency room staff fail to act reasonably, do not follow the proper procedures, or ignore warnings connected to medicines, a patient’s condition can worsen. In extreme cases, patient could die. When an error caused by medical negligence occurs in a hospital or Emergency Room, the people responsible should be held responsible. A hospital malpractice lawyer in Tampa is a valuable resource to help get compensation for the damages you or your family has suffered, whether the injury happened in the Tampa Bay area or elsewhere in Florida.
Malpractice claims are complex, time-consuming and expensive. The Florida Legislature has designed a system that provides many advantages to doctors, nurses, hospitals and others in the medical field and which make it difficult to bring an action holding them accountable for their negligent conduct. Your Tampa medical malpractice lawyer can help you determine if you have a malpractice claim that can and should be pursued. They can help you investigate your incident, collect evidence, and handle all communication with the insurance companies and medical facilities on your behalf. Your malpractice lawyer can negotiate a settlement with insurance carriers or take them to court.
Although we’re based in Tampa, our reputation for succeeding in complex cases leads us to practice statewide, serving cities including:
Some of the most frequent, and preventable, errors can arise from simple negligence or a lack of training or preparedness.
Time is tissue. When an ER doctor misreads stroke symptoms as migraine or sends a sepsis patient home with “flu,” precious minutes are lost, leading to brain damage, amputations, or death.
Wrong‑drug, wrong‑dose, and drug‑interaction mistakes can trigger hemorrhages, heart failure, or fatal allergic reactions. Electronic prescription systems are only as safe as the humans who program and follow them.
Retained sponges, wrong‑site procedures, and anesthesia failures flood ICU beds with patients who were scheduled for routine operations — errors that almost never occur when checklists are followed and the healthcare providers abide by the professional standard of care owed to their patients.
Post‑operative nurses must track oxygen saturation, blood pressure, heart rate, pain levels, and mental status – just to name a few. Ignoring alarms, changes in a patient’s condition, or delaying physician notification allows treatable complications to spiral and to result in an aggravation of a patient’s condition or create new injuries altogether.
Sending a patient home too soon, without test results or clear return‑instructions, can lead to re‑admissions, cardiac arrest, or undiagnosed internal bleeding.
Radiologists and pathologists who overlook a small pulmonary embolism, a tumor, fracture, brain bleed, or malignant cell cluster deny patients the chance for timely, life-saving treatment.
Overcrowded emergency rooms sometimes divert critical patients to the waiting room while non-emergent cases receive immediate beds, violating national triage standards and endangering lives.
Every malpractice case has four pillars: duty, breach, causation, and damages.
We establish duty by showing you were a patient under the a doctor’s care or the care of hospital staff.
We prove breach by having nationally respected physicians explain exactly how the staff breached their duty of reasonable care and how what they did or failed to do fell below that basic standard of care.
We link that breach to your injury with timelines, audit logs, authoritative medical literature, and testimony of medical professional that explain how the breach of the professional standard of care caused injuries that should have never occurred.
Finally, we document damages – past bills, future treatment expense, lost income, and the value of pain, disability, and the loss of the ability to enjoy life as you once did. When each pillar stands solid, insurers, doctors, and hospitals have nowhere to hide.
Florida’s medical‑malpractice laws are full of complexities hurdles, but most patients have five big questions:
Generally, you get two years from the day you discovered — or reasonably should have discovered — that malpractice occurred. In almost every case, the absolute deadline is four years after the incident, unless fraud is involved. Under most circumstances, you can obtain a 90 day extension of the statute of limitation. However, calculating the deadline to sue is often quite complicated, so you should always contact an experienced medical malpractice as soon as you have any suspicion that you have been a victim of malpractice. Waiting to contact a lawyer is almost always a mistake.
Before any lawsuit may be filed, we must hire an independent, medical expert who will review all the relevant records to determine whether or not there has been a breach of the prevailing professional standard of care and whether you were injured as a result. If that has occurred, then the expert will sign a sworn affidavit expressing his conclusion regarding the negligence. That affidavit is then provided to the negligent healthcare provider along with a formal notice of your intention to sue. That starts a 90 day presuit period where the parties exchange information. It is only after the completion of this period that a Complaint can be filed.
Will there be a chance to settle early?
Yes, although that only very rarely happens in medical malpractice cases. During that 90-day window, hospitals and insurers conduct their own review, and many negotiate in good faith. Historically, howver, that almost always happens only after a lawsuit has been filed. It is important to hire a medical malpractice lawyer that has the resources and experience necessary to file and prosecute a malpractice case. Many people (and many lawyers who do not handle malpractice cases) are under the mistaken belief that medical malpractice cases will settle with a few letters or telephone calls. That is almost never the case and litigation is almost always required – so hire a lawyer that can do more than write letters of chat on a phone.
Are there caps on compensation?
Economic losses, things like hospital bills and lost wages, are fully recoverable. Florida removed most caps after several Supreme Court decisions for pain, suffering, or loss of enjoyment of life, leaving the door open to full, fair damages.
What if the hospital blames me?
Under Florida’s modified comparative‑fault rule, the defense will try. If they convince a jury you were more than 50 percent responsible, your recovery disappears. Our job is to ensure the evidence shows the fault lies squarely with the professionals who owed you a duty of care.
When you think that you have been injured because of how a hospital or ER handled your care, you need to act quickly. With the help of your medical malpractice attorney, you can lock down essential evidence to support your case, identify who can be liable for your injuries, and find specialists to support your claims.
Useful evidence for your claims includes:
Our firm catalogues and secures each piece, building a cohesive narrative of how the error unfolded and why it was preventable.
There are a few parties who may be held accountable for their negligent acts, including:
Identifying every responsible party maximizes available insurance coverage and increases your chances of full compensation.
Juries believe hard data. When needed, we obtain and present original electronic health‑record logs showing who accessed your chart and when. We match those entries against medication‑administration records, nursing flow sheets, radiology images, and lab results. Hospital policies and prior inspection reports reveal whether the facility ignored its safety standards. Family texts, photographs, or diary notes often capture symptoms the staff failed to chart. Each piece fits into a timeline that makes negligence unmistakable.
Our investigators interview or depose nurses and techs , then hand the file to specialists who can spot charts that don’t add up. We pore over staffing schedules, safety manuals, and accreditation audits to expose systemic problems like chronic understaffing or outdated equipment. Life‑care planners project your future medical needs; economists tally lost earning potential.
When you have been injured and find yourself as a victim of medical malpractice, you can recover economic and non-economic losses. In some cases, you may pursue punitive damages. In fatal cases of malpractice, your loved ones may pursue a wrongful death benefits claim.
Reserved for gross negligence or intentional misconduct—such as falsifying records to hide an error.
Florida Statutes § 768.21 allows spouses, children, and, in limited cases, parents of adult children to claim funeral costs, loss of support, and mental pain and suffering when malpractice proves fatal.
For more than fifty years, WMW has shouldered the legal burden for Floridians devastated by medical mistakes. We bring:
When you visit a medical facility, you’re expecting to get better and should feel improvement once you leave. However, when that isn’t the case, you need to contact a malpractice attorney to ensure you are properly and fairly compensated for medical errors at a hospital or emergency room.
The experienced medical malpractice attorneys at WMW in Tampa understand the pain you are feeling and the challenge you are facing. We will compassionately guide you through the aftermath of a medical malpractice incident and get you the compensation you deserve.
We're Available — Call Today
