Once it is established that a case satisfies the statute of limitations, a lawsuit can only be filed if a patient’s medical malpractice lawyer finds an expert who is willing to testify about a breach of standard care.

In every medical malpractice lawsuit, the overarching question is whether a doctor breached the standard of care in his or her field of practice. Standard care requirements are different for each area of medicine so medical malpractice expert witnesses must be doctors who practice in the area of medicine involved in a particular lawsuit. In order to show that there has been a breach of the standard care in a medical field, there must be an expert witness who is willing to testify for the plaintiff and say that the doctor in question failed to meet the standard of care requirements in the industry. Without expert testimony, medical malpractice cases cannot even be filed.

Illinois Medical Malpractice Damages

There are three types of damages that are generally available in Illinois law: economic damages, non-economic damages and punitive damages. As the name suggests, punitive damages are used as a form of punishment, and are not available in medical malpractice. The reasoning behind no punitive damages is that medical malpractice is a form of negligence, which is a non-intentional tort that society generally does not punish.

Economic damages include all of the medical bills and expenses that arise from malpractice, which can range from hospital bills, prescriptions and transportation costs involved. There are no caps, or limitations to the amount of medical malpractice economic damages that juries can award. Anything that a patient is billed for as a result of malpractice is an economic damage that doctors and hospitals are liable for.

Non-economic damages involve payment for all of the intangible expenses that patents endure, such as pain and suffering or even loss of relationships. As of August of 2005, non-economic damages are limited to $500,000.00 against individual doctors and $1,000,000.00 against hospitals. Thus, an Illinois jury’s decision for the total amount of damages owed to a patient is limited to the medical costs associated with the malpractice, plus a maximum of $1.5 million for non-economic damages.

Comparative Negligence in Illinois Medical Malpractice

Once a conclusion is reached for the amount of damages that were incurred by a patient, juries are asked to deduct from those damages a percentage of the patient’s own comparative fault. Damages can be deducted as far as 50%, but once a patient’s fault is recognized as more than half, damages for the plaintiff are removed entirely.

The 50/50 comparative negligence test in Illinois only allows medical malpractice recovery against doctors when patients are 50% or less at fault. For example, if a patient is released from a hospital, and instructed by a doctor not to drive for one week while on antibiotics, but ignores the instructions, crashes a car and is severely injured, a jury would probably find that although the antibiotic may have caused the accident, the patient was more than 50% at fault for ignoring the doctor’s instructions, and thus barred from recovery against the doctor who ordered the prescription.

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