Any claim for medical negligence can be inherently difficult to win. The reason for this is that certain injuries are not always easy to identify. Sometimes follow up appointments need to be made and clinicians need to wait to see how symptoms develop before taking action and making a proper diagnosis.
But sometimes, things are simply missed.
A knee ligament injury can result in serious and lifelong suffering and potential disability. It’s therefore important to get the right standard of care or you can end up unnecessarily suffering or being worse off if action isn’t taken early on enough. Even a simple tear can become a serious problem if not treated early on, with ligament ruptures often being the worse.
Speaking from experience, most ligament ruptures need to be dealt with within three weeks or so. I’m not a medical expert, but having suffered serious multi ligament ruptures in my knee, this is what I was told. So when might you have been the victim of medical negligence through a failure to diagnose, or a misdiagnosis?
If you exhibit any of the following symptoms, A+E should be able to consider whether a ligament injury has sustained:
- Unable to weight bare on the affected leg
- Considerable pain and swelling in the affected area, and potentially down the leg
- Hearing a click or a popping sound at the time of the injury being sustained (usually indicating a rupture as the ligament literally snaps – sorry for the graphic description there)
- Difficulty moving the joint
If the injury was sustained from an impact or in a sporting scenario, this can be indicative of a ligament injury as it’s commonly sports that cause them to the knees.
If you are then discharged and not given any kind of splint or any kind of follow up appointments for further investigations or scans, they may have misdiagnosed or failed to diagnose you. It could depend on what they have said though – if they suggest it’s just a strain or sprain or something like that, even though you have the symptoms outlined above, they may have failed you.
Particularly with ruptures, if action isn’t taken within a few weeks, you could end up with prolonged suffering and rehabilitation. As I said earlier, it’s important to recognise that sometimes it’s difficult to tell and so follow up appointments need to be arranged.
To help you see how even the most obvious of cases can be missed let me bore you with the details of what happened to me – you might be surprised at how badly they missed it!
When I did mine, I was x-rayed and advised that I had chipped a small piece of bone off the top of my tibia. As such, because a bone fracture had occurred, I was referred to an orthopaedic consultant the following day as a matter of course as a bone injury had occurred. I was advised at A+E that all I had done was chipped the bone and I could expect a full recovery within six weeks. All the symptoms I was exhibited where apparently indicative of this.
But upon seeing the orthopaedic department the following day, they immediately diagnosed a multi ligament injury before they had even scanned it – just by taking one look at my knee.
The point of telling you that is to show that even in a case like mine where I exhibited all of the classic and obvious symptoms of ligament injuries, A+E still failed to pick it up. In some way I was lucky I had a bone injury as well, otherwise they would never have referred me to an orthopaedic expert. They simply wrote it off as a simple bone chip.
So it can happen – and I was in surgery less than three days later as a priority case. It turns out the bone injury was one of the ligaments pulling a piece of bone with it, but it was lucky this had happened or I could have been sent home without the proper follow up care I required. I was very shocked when the orthopaedics informed me that A+E had incorrectly diagnosed the injury and that it was far more serious than it was made out to be. In addition, I had drop foot as well which was even more clearly evident that ligaments had been ruptured! In fact, it makes it blatantly obvious.
So if you have not been diagnosed correctly and this has caused further suffering and adverse affects, it is always worth speaking to us about a potential claim for personal injury compensation. For medical negligence cases we offer a full 100% compensation agreement and a No Win, No Fee service.
