When medical professionals fail to properly monitor a fetal heart rate during labor and delivery, it can lead to devastating outcomes. Understanding the risks associated with the failure to monitor fetal heart rate and your rights as a parent is the key to protecting your rights.
Why is monitoring fetal heart rate so important?
Fetal heart rate monitoring is a standard practice during labor and delivery. The fetal heart rate provides information about the baby’s well-being. This allows healthcare providers to detect signs of distress, such as a lack of oxygen, before they it can cause major complications. The heart rate is monitored either continuously or intermittently. Doctors may use external or internal methods, depending on the situation and risk factors.
When the fetal heart rate indicates distress, timely interventions can save lives. These include changing the mother’s position, providing oxygen, administering medication or in severe cases, performing an emergency cesarean section. Failure to monitor or respond appropriately to signs of fetal distress constitutes a serious breach of the standard of care for healthcare providers.
What happens if providers fail to intervene?
Some of the most common injuries resulting from a failure to monitor fetal heart rate include Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE), a type of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation during birth. This can lead to long-term disabilities such as cerebral palsy, developmental delays and cognitive impairments. Cerebral palsy, in turn, affects muscle control, coordination and movement throughout a child’s life.
In the most tragic cases, the failure to monitor and act on fetal distress can result in the death of the baby.
Filing a medical malpractice claim
If you suspect that a failure to monitor fetal heart rate led to injury or the loss of your child, you may have grounds for a medical malpractice claim. Medical malpractice occurs when a healthcare provider’s failure to meet the standard of care results in harm to the patient. In birth injury cases, a plaintiff must prove the provider owed them and the baby a duty of care, the provider breached that duty by failing to monitor the fetal heart rate or respond appropriately to signs of distress, and that the breach directly caused harm to the baby, such as injury or death.
Filing a medical malpractice claim can recover compensation for medical expenses, ongoing care needs, pain and suffering and related damages. It can also hold the responsible parties accountable. This may prevent similar incidents from happening to others.
If you believe that your baby’s injury or death was the result of a failure to monitor fetal heart rate, it’s important to seek legal advice as soon as possible. Call the Law Offices of Tim Misny right away to learn more about your options.
Talk to an Ohio birth injury attorney today
The Law Offices of Tim Misny can help you with your medical malpractice claim. If you or a loved one were injured due to someone else’s negligence or recklessness, I’ll Make Them Pay!® Call my office at (877) 944-4373 so that I can evaluate your case right away.
