Experienced Lee's Summit Medical Malpractice Lawyer
Lee's Summit Missouri medical malpractice lawyer Jeffrey Carey brings experience and compassion to your medical malpractice case.
When you go to a doctor, hospital, or nursing home, you’re putting your life or a loved one’s life in someone else’s hands. Doctors almost always have the patient's best interests at heart but they cause harm with avoidable errors and the patient should not be the one to bear those medical and emotional costs without compensation. When careless medical errors cause serious harm, families are left with heavier bills, harder recoveries, and questions that never seem to get a straight answer. There are cases where providers are actively and even intentionally harming patients. In those cases, Jeffrey Carey is particularly interested in ensuring that justice is served.
As a medical malpractice lawyer based in Lee’s Summit and serving the Kansas City area, Jeffrey Carey helps patients and families sort out what happened, whether the standard of care was violated, and what can be done about it. My focus is on clear, avoidable medical negligence that caused permanent or life-changing injury.
If you believe a medical mistake has changed your life or you are trying to get answers about the loss of a loved one, you don’t have to sort this out alone.
Call (816) 246-9445 for a free consultation with a medical malpractice lawyer. You will never owe fees or costs to us unless we recover for you.
What Is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice is more than a bad outcome or a complication that can happen even with good care. A malpractice case involves three core questions:
- Did the provider follow the accepted standard of care?
- Did they fail to do something a reasonably careful provider would have done, or do something a careful provider would not have done?
- Did that failure cause serious, avoidable harm?
In practical terms, medical negligence happens millions of times a day. Fortunately, most neglicence does not cause any harm but merely inconveniences us or goes unnoticed. In some cases, the medical professionals are able to catch their mistake early enough to fix the problem they created. When that mistake causes serious harm, however, you deserve answers about why this happened to you or a loved one. Whatever the error, the focus will be on the science and medical standards that were supposed to keep you or a loved one safe.
We will investigate what went wrong, why it happened, and do all we can to ensure that your future needs are provided for.
How We Investigate Medical Negligence
A strong medical malpractice case is built carefully and methodically. When we agree to investigate a claim, we:
- Listen to your story. You have a unique story of loss and, whether you know it or not, you have all of the clues we need to start our investigation. We will conduct in-depth interviews with you.
- Gather all relevant records. Often families seeking answers have already tried to deciper thousands of pages of medical records to learn what went wrong. We can gather those records for you and conduct expert analysis to look for evidence and clues.
- Consult qualified medical experts. We have specialists available to review the records and our analysis to give admissible opinions in court. In most cases, a medical negligence lawsuit is not filed until a legally qualified healthcare expert has certified your case. In all cases, they can give us insight and the benefit of their years of education and experience.
- Construct a clear timeline. We take the information we gather from interviews, record reviews, our research, expert reports, and other sources and combine them into timelines that begin to tell a story.
- Evaluate causation and damages. After this investigation, we provide you with our clearest understanding of whether the negligence led to the injury or loss and help you evaluate the damages that you have incurred. We document lost income, medical expenses (past and future), and other direct costs. We talk to you about the intangible losses that money cannot compensate for. When our investigation is complete, you will have the best information we can provide about whether or not a suit it warranted in your case.
Not every bad outcome is malpractice and not every act of malpractice is economically viable to pursue. Part of our role is to give you an honest assessment so you can make informed decisions about your options.
Birth Injuries
Birth injuries can occur when doctors or nurses miss signs of fetal distress, mishandle labor and delivery, delay a needed C-section, or misuse tools like forceps or vacuums. These errors can lead to death of your child, permanent brain injuries, cerebral palsy, nerve damage, or other life-changing conditions. We investigate the labor and delivery course, fetal monitoring strips, and newborn records to determine whether your child’s injuries were preventable and what financial resources will be needed for lifetime care. We have relationships with expert witnesses that can work with us to develop a lifecare plan for your child that includes home care, medical care, necessary changes to your home to accomodate disability, future income streams to compensate your child for the income they will never have, and financial support for the family to adapt to the changes in their lives and loss of income that comes with being a caregiver.
Failure to Diagnose and Misdiagnosis
Early diagnosis is often the difference between a manageable condition and a very poor prognosis. When a provider ignores abnormal test results, doesn't properly read imaging, fails to order appropriate testing, or brushes off clear warning signs, diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke, and infections can progress unchecked. We compare what was known at the time to what a reasonably careful provider would have done, and we work with experts to determine how much better the outcome could have been with a timely diagnosis. In come cases where the patient passes, we are assessing the lost chance of survival that they may have been denied. If you are going to get a cancer diagnosis, you want it at Stage 1 and not Stage 3 or 4.
Surgical Errors
Every surgery carries some risk. A malpractice case focuses on preventable errors like operating on the wrong body part, leaving instruments or sponges inside the patient, damaging nearby organs or nerves through inattention, or failing to monitor the patient’s condition during and after surgery. We review operative reports, anesthesia records, and post-operative care to determine whether a surgical injury was a known risk or the result of substandard care. Surgeons earn extraordinary income within the medical profession because it takes extrordinary skill to heal with a knife. At times, however, less experienced or incompetent surgeons attempt procedures best left in the hands of a specialist. Because of the allure of money, some surgeons enter and stay in the field when their skills are not up to par or after they begin to experience decline later in life.
Surgery is always risky, and the vast majority of deaths or injuries that happen on the operating table are unpreventable with reasonable care. When you do not receive reasonable care during your surgery, however, you deserve answers and compensation for your losses.
Nursing Home Neglect
Nursing home residents are vulnerable to pressure sores, falls, infections, dehydration, and abuse when facilities are understaffed or poorly supervised. Neglect often shows up as unexplained bruises, sudden weight loss, repeated infections, or a resident who’s suddenly fearful or withdrawn. We examine staffing levels, care plans, charting, and incident reports to identify when a nursing home failed to meet basic standards of safety and dignity.
Medication and Pharmacy Errors
Medication mistakes can happen in the doctor’s office, at the hospital, or at the pharmacy counter. Common errors include prescribing the wrong drug, the wrong dose, dangerous drug combinations, or failing to monitor for known side effects. Pharmacies can misfill prescriptions, misread handwriting, or confuse similar drug names. These errors can cause organ damage, strokes, internal bleeding, or death. We trace the medication trail from prescription to administration to see where the system failed.
Emergency Room Negligence
Emergency departments are busy, but they’re still required to triage and treat patients safely. Serious negligence can occur when signs of heart attack, stroke, sepsis, or internal bleeding are missed, or when a patient is sent home despite clear red-flags. We look at triage notes, timing of tests, communication between providers, and discharge instructions to determine whether the ER acted reasonably under the circumstances.
Hospital-Acquired Infections and Sepsis
Hospitals must follow infection-control protocols to protect vulnerable patients. When they don’t, patients can develop preventable infections at IV sites, surgical incisions, catheters, or ventilators. Delayed recognition of infection or sepsis — a life-threatening reaction to infection — can quickly become fatal. We assess whether proper hygiene procedures, monitoring, and timely treatment were followed, or whether systemic breakdowns allowed an infection to spiral out of control.