Neonatal birth injuries are complicated to diagnose, and it can sometimes be unclear what caused them. You need careful investigation and accurate valuation of the harm if you’re going to get fair support for your child. A birth injury lawyer here in Atlanta, GA can help you do just that.
How an Atlanta, GA Birth Injury Lawyer Investigates and Values Neonatal Birth Injuries
There’s two key stages to building your claim:
- A detailed investigation into what happened
- A careful calculation of the full value of the resulting needs
Investigating
Gathering Documentation
The investigation will begin with a complete collection of all the relevant medical records, including prenatal charts, labor and delivery notes, fetal heart rate monitoring strips, Apgar scores, neonatal intensive care unit records, and any imaging or laboratory results.
Expert Examination
The next step is to have an expert examine the fetal heart rate tracings and compare these against established guidelines. Category II or III tracings that go unaddressed for too long often indicate fetal distress that required a faster response than was provided, such as an emergency cesarean section. The goal here is to look for whether the care the mother and baby were given matched what a reasonably careful provider would have done under the same circumstances.
Proving Causation
“Causation” means linking the medical error directly to the harm. Laboratory findings, brain imaging, and the baby’s early symptoms may all help confirm this connection. For example, the patterns of brain injury visible on an MRI could match up with moments of oxygen deprivation at specific points during labor. Independent medical experts will normally be called in to analyze this information and provide insight.
Valuating
Once the investigation confirms that negligence played a role, your lawyer will work on putting a number value to the losses. This process has to uncover and calculate the full economic and non-economic impact this injury will have over your child’s lifetime.
Life-Care Planners
Your lawyer may call life-care planners, who are specialists that know how to create detailed projections of every medical and support service your child will need. They look at the frequency and cost of physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, special education support, surgeries, and assistive devices and build a plan.
Economists
Economists might be called in to look at the life-care plan and then translate it into present-day dollar amounts. They can also help calculate lost future wages based on what the child would likely have earned in their career had they not been injured.
Emotional Losses
The valuation stage also needs to consider the emotional and relational effects this injury will have on the entire family. The care the baby needs may mean that siblings receive less attention, for example, or that parents have their careers interrupted. The overall household stress can be significant, and while money can’t actually fix any of these problems, it can provide support to the family to deal with them and acknowledge the seriousness of the harm.
If your baby has suffered a preventable injury at birth, reach out to us now at LawMD Chartered in Atlanta or Washington DC now. Our lawyers are doctors, too, and we understand the standards of care and how to find out when they’ve been violated.
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