Personal injury lawyers

Post-traumatic stress disorder is, I think, it's very misunderstood. The little things that seem so insignificant to a bystander can actually take you straight back to that moment. I was in charge on a night shift with this particular patient, and he seemed perfectly fine before he decided to stab me. He stabbed me in the face, missed my eye by a centimetre and I sustained a fractured eye socket and a penetrating stab wound. I’ve lost that passion for my job. I do want, I hope eventually that I will go back to it, but I can't say with any honesty at this point in time that I will go back to hands-on nursing.

I remember a conversation with Andrew, the first time I met him, and I went in and had a chat. And I just said, ‘should I even be doing this’? And I remember him saying ‘you 100 per cent need to let me do this with you’.

Amanda was, when she first saw me, she was really struggling she. She was clearly impacted by what had happened.

I just wanted to be heard, really. I wanted people to understand that the part that made me a good nurse was broken.

These cases are always difficult. The insurer, again, in this situation behaved badly. They denied liability. They made measly offers, and it wasn't until we pushed right the way through to make sure that she got the compensation that she was entitled to.

So it's been good to know that at least, in the regard of financially the damage has been repaired, yeah it's been good.

Well, about three years ago I, uh, I was looking in the mirror and I noticed a little, just a little, lump right here on my neck. Didn't think too much about it, but I was going to see my doctor anyway. He looked at me, ‘okay we'll get it checked out’. Got the ultrasound done about three days later. And from the ultrasound, I said I’ll just check the other side, just to be on the safe side. And at that point, I knew something was wrong. It was about a week later that we found out that it was it was melanoma.

The surgeon wanted to know where it came from and so they went back to some testing that was done a few years ago. And they found that that was the primary, that's where the cancer had started. And it was at that point that my doctor looked at me and said, ‘look, there's a problem here that I can't help you with, but you need to seek some legal advice because this should have been addressed a couple years ago. 

In relation to Bruce's case, he went to see a doctor and he had an examination and a test done, but unfortunately that test wasn't interpreted properly and that led to a delay in him being diagnosed with stage four melanoma of around two years. 

I didn't want to litigate, I don't want to deal with lawyers, I don't want to do any of this. I did it because of an obligation of the family that you know something happened and I’m not gonna last and you know we I need to make sure that they're taken care of. And to be honest I didn't want it in front of my mind, I had to I had treatments, I had work I had family and I had to deal with, you know, the fact that I’ve got cancer and and that's enough.

Medical negligence is a really complex area of the law. The reason why Maurice Blackburn is able to do such a great job for patients, who have had a medical error, is because we are the biggest national medical negligence department in Australia.

The decision to use Maurice Blackburn was the best decision we ever made. It took all the pressure off kathy and I. We didn't have to think about it. We didn't have to worry about it. We knew that we had them behind us and they had the expertise.