Under What Circumstances Can You Sue a Mental Health Facility?
Mental health care facilities are psychiatric institutions which serve the needs of individuals experiencing severe mental, behavioral, or emotional disorders. These facilities often provide residential as well as hospital inpatient and outpatient services. Due to factors such as patient residency and the vulnerability of patients, problematic patient care, if it occurs, can be both deeply serious and perpetuated unnoticed.
When a healthcare provider in any field neglects the standard of care and injures the patient as a result, there has been an incident of medical malpractice. Standard of care, in this usage, refers to the level of skill and attention that it is expected would be offered by the average doctor in this particular situation. While this can be a difficult term to explicitly define, doctors who act outside of the expected and recognized norms of medical care can be shown to be in disregard of the accepted standard. In short, the harm you sustained would not have happened under another physician’s care. Under these circumstances, a victim is well within their rights to bring legal charges against the healthcare provider.