Families who call about a medical mistake usually start by apologizing for taking up the time. They are not sure anything went wrong, only that the explanation they were given does not account for what happened. Sorting that out is the work, and it starts with the records rather than with a lawsuit.
Zavodnick & Lasky Personal Injury Lawyers handle medical malpractice claims in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties. If a hospital, a doctor, or a nursing staff left you or a family member worse off than you arrived, call (215) 875-7030 and we will tell you what the chart shows.
Do you have a medical malpractice case?
A claim requires four things: a provider who owed you a duty of care, care that fell below the accepted standard, a causal link between that failure and your injury, and damages that followed. All four have to be present. Three out of four is a bad outcome without a claim.
That last point is the one that decides most calls. Medicine carries risk even when it is practiced correctly, and a surgery can go badly without anyone having done anything wrong. What separates the two is whether a competent provider in the same situation would have acted differently, which is a question for a physician reviewing the file.
What is a certificate of merit, and why does it decide whether a case moves?
A Pennsylvania malpractice case cannot proceed on a complaint alone. Pa.R.C.P. 1042.3 requires a certificate of merit filed with the complaint or within sixty days after it, stating that a licensed professional has provided a written opinion that the care fell outside acceptable standards and caused the harm.
Miss that filing and the defense can take a judgment of non pros, ending the case before any evidence changes hands. That requirement is the reason malpractice intake works the way it does.
It also explains a conversation patients find frustrating. When a firm says it needs the records before answering whether there is a case, that is not hedging. Nobody can file this kind of claim responsibly without a physician’s opinion in hand, and building that opinion takes weeks of collecting and reading charts.
Call (215) 875-7030 if you want that review started.
The mistakes that turn into claims in Philadelphia
The pattern across this region’s hospitals and practices is consistent, and most claims fall into a handful of categories.
Surgical errors, including operating on the wrong site, damaging an adjacent structure, and objects left inside a patient. Diagnostic failures, where a condition was missed or mistaken for something else, which is the most common category in emergency departments. Our page on emergency room errors covers how those claims are built.
Medication and anesthesia errors, from the wrong drug or dose to monitoring failures during a procedure. Labor and delivery injuries, which are their own practice area and are covered on our birth injury page. And failures of nursing care, including pressure injuries, falls, and infections that trace back to how a patient was monitored rather than to a single decision.
A pattern worth noticing: many of these are documentation cases as much as medical ones. The difference between a defensible chart and an indefensible one is often what was recorded, when, and by whom.
The people and institutions that can answer for a medical injury
More parties than patients expect. A treating physician is the obvious defendant, and often not the only one.
| Potential defendant | How responsibility usually arises |
| Physician or surgeon | The clinical decision or technique itself |
| Nurses and nursing staff | Monitoring, medication administration, escalation failures |
| Hospital or health system | Conduct of employees, and its own failures in staffing, credentialing or policy |
| Physician group or practice | Employment relationship with the treating provider |
| Anesthesiologist or CRNA | Airway, dosing and monitoring during a procedure |
| Pharmacy | Dispensing and interaction errors |
Whether a hospital answers for a doctor’s conduct usually turns on the employment relationship, which the records reveal. Many physicians at Philadelphia hospitals are not employees of the hospital, a distinction that does not appear anywhere on the patient’s paperwork but shapes who gets sued.
Confirming a provider’s license and disciplinary status is also part of the early work, and the Commonwealth makes that license verification available to the public.
What can you recover, and does Pennsylvania cap damages?
Pennsylvania does not cap the compensatory damages in a medical malpractice case. There is no ceiling on economic losses and none on noneconomic losses, which sets this state apart from much of the country.
Recovery generally covers medical costs already incurred and the cost of care going forward, lost income and lost earning capacity, and the human losses: pain, disability, disfigurement, and the loss of the things a person could do before. Where a patient dies, a wrongful death claim covers the family’s losses and a survival action covers what the patient endured.
Punitive damages are treated differently. They require conduct beyond ordinary negligence, they are limited by statute to twice the compensatory damages in most malpractice cases, and a portion of any punitive award goes to the state’s MCARE Fund rather than to the patient. Our resource on the types of damages available in personal injury cases covers the categories in more detail.
How long do you have to file a malpractice case in Pennsylvania?
Two years from the date of the injury, in most cases. The complication is that patients frequently do not know they were injured on the day it happened.
The discovery rule addresses that. Where an injury and its cause could not reasonably have been discovered right away, the two years can run from when the patient knew or should have known. Set against that is a seven-year outer limit that applies to most adult claims, with exceptions written into the statute for objects left inside the body.
Children have longer. A claim on behalf of a minor generally runs from the child’s eighteenth birthday, which is why birth injury cases can be brought years after the delivery.
None of that is a reason to wait. Records get archived, staff move on, and memories about a shift two years ago are worth less than a chart pulled while the treatment is recent.
Where can a Pennsylvania malpractice case be filed now?
Anywhere venue is otherwise proper, which is a change from how these cases worked for two decades. Until recently, a medical malpractice case had to be filed in the county where the treatment occurred.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rescinded that restriction effective January 1, 2023. Malpractice claims now follow the same venue rules as other civil cases, which means a health system that regularly does business in Philadelphia can be sued here even when the care happened elsewhere.
Venue is not a technicality. It determines the jury pool, the court’s scheduling practices, and how quickly a case moves through discovery. It is a fair question to ask any firm you consult: where would they file this, and why.
What to do when you suspect something went wrong
Request your complete medical records in writing. You have a right to them, hospitals have a process for it, and the request costs nothing but a form and a copying fee. Ask for the full chart, not a summary, and put the date range in writing.
Write down the timeline while it is fresh: who examined the patient and when, what was said, which symptoms were reported, what was prescribed, who was on shift. Details like the time a call bell went unanswered do not appear in any chart, and six months later nobody remembers them.
Keep going to your follow-up care, with a provider you trust. A gap in treatment after a suspected error gets used later to argue the injury was not serious.
Two things worth avoiding. Do not sign anything from a hospital’s risk management department without having it read first, because some of those documents resolve claims. And do not confront the provider for an admission, which rarely produces one and can change how the record gets written from that point forward.
How a malpractice case moves once it is filed
These cases run on a longer track than other injury claims, and knowing the sequence makes the wait easier to live with.
The pre-suit phase is records collection and physician review, and it is where most of the work happens before anything is public. The complaint and certificate of merit follow, within the deadlines described above.
Discovery comes next: written questions, document requests, and depositions of the providers, the nursing staff, and the patient or family. Each side’s physician witnesses are deposed after that, which is usually the point at which both sides can see the case clearly.
Most cases resolve after that stage, frequently at a mediation. A smaller number are tried, and a case tried in Philadelphia is heard by a jury drawn from the city.
What happens in the first ninety days of a claim
We request the complete chart rather than the discharge summary. That means nursing notes, medication administration records, imaging in its original form, and the audit trail showing who accessed or amended the record and when. A discharge summary is a narrative written afterward, and it rarely contains the detail that decides these cases.
We send preservation letters covering electronic records, fetal monitoring strips, device logs and imaging files, because a printout is not the same evidence as the native file.
We have the chart reviewed by a physician practicing in the same field. That review, rather than the family’s account or our own reading, determines whether a case can be certified under Rule 1042.3 and pursued.
And we calendar the deadline from day one, including the discovery question and the rules that apply to children, so the filing date is never the thing that ends a valid claim.
Questions Philadelphia patients ask about malpractice claims
Is a bad outcome the same as malpractice?
No. A claim requires care that fell below the accepted standard and caused the harm, and medicine carries real risk even when it is done correctly. A physician reviewing the records is what separates the two.
Can I sue the hospital or only the doctor?
Both are possible. Hospitals can answer for the conduct of their employees and, in some situations, for their own failures in staffing, credentialing, or enforcing policy. Which theory applies depends on relationships the records usually reveal.
How long does a malpractice case take?
Longer than most injury cases, commonly years rather than months, because of the record review, the physician work and the court’s schedule. Any firm promising a fast resolution on this kind of claim is describing something other than how these cases move.
What does it cost to have a case reviewed?
These cases run on a contingency basis, so the fee comes out of any recovery and is approved as part of the case. The physician review that decides whether a claim can be filed is part of what the firm takes on.
My family member died. Is that a different kind of case?
It brings two claims: a wrongful death claim for the family’s losses and a survival action for what the patient went through. Both have their own deadlines, and the estate has to be opened before either can be filed.
Start with the records, not with a decision
You do not have to decide whether to sue anyone today. The first step is finding out what the chart actually says, and that is something the office can begin while you are still deciding.
Zavodnick & Lasky Personal Injury Lawyers represent patients and families throughout Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery and Bucks counties, on a contingency basis, so the fee comes out of what is recovered and is approved by the court. Call (215) 875-7030. You can see the kinds of matters the firm has handled on our case results page.
