What to do about Misdiagnosis of Diabetes

A misdiagnosis of diabetes has resulted in my daughter taking insulin injections four times a day for four months, after a type 1 diabetes diagnosis.  That diabetes diagnosis has now been ruled out, and she has started treatment for a pancreas infection.  Is it possible to claim compensation for this medical mistake?

A recent report issued by the Royal College of General Practitioners suggests that the misdiagnosis of diabetes  accounts for over 100,000 cases of diabetes in the UK which have been misdiagnosed, misclassified or miscoded. There are currently 2.4 million registered diabetics in England, and it has been estimated that 50,000 of these have been told that they have diabetes when they do not. In the case of Type 1 diabetes when insulin injections are required to help maintain blood sugar levels, if these are administered to a healthy individual they can cause damage to the body and can lower blood sugar to dangerous levels.

A misdiagnosis such as this could have caused serious harm to your daughter, and it could well be possible to claim compensation for this error due to medical negligence of the doctor or doctors who made the diagnosis. If the insulin injections and/or any other diabetic medicine have had an impact on your daughter´s health, you could be eligible to make a misdiagnosis of diabetes compensation claim.

Even though, in this case, there appears to have been a serious mistake made, in order to claim misdiagnosis of diabetes compensation you will need to enlist the services of a medical negligence solicitor. A misdiagnosis alone is not sufficient to warrant a compensation claim, even if there has been an injury as a result. It is only when the doctor or hospital has been deemed to be negligent that a claim for compensation can be made. A medical negligence solicitor would present the case to a panel of experts who would be required to decide if, based on the facts that were available at the time and under the circumstances that led to the misdiagnosis of diabetes, that a competent doctor would have been able take a different course of action which would have correctly diagnosed the problem; or that an adequate follow up would have highlighted the error sooner.

If it can be proven that this was a case of hospital negligence, you will be able to claim misdiagnosis of diabetes compensation for any harm to your daughter as a direct result of the diabetes treatment, or for any damage, pain and suffering as a result of the delay to the treatment of the pancreas infection.