Diabetes: diagnosis and treatment failures

Diabetes is a lifelong condition that reportedly affects 3.5 million people in the U.K. alone.

Type one diabetes is where the body is unable to produce any insulin and so the cells are unable to use the blood sugar for energy which creates a build-up of sugar in your blood stream; and Type two diabetes is where either not enough insulin is produced or the insulin is not working properly so the cells can only get access to certain amounts of sugar, meaning that blood sugar levels can build-up.

When effectively managed, people are fine to live a relatively normal life when suffering with diabetes, but diagnosis and treatment is key. As such, any failures to treat or diagnosis the condition can be catastrophic.

Mistreatment or delayed diagnoses

There are incidents where diabetes can have a detrimental effect on a person’s life, and they can even include:

• Amputation of limbs
• Heart attacks
• Strokes
• Blindness
• Kidney failure

These can happen in extreme cases if a person does not manage the condition correctly, so any cases of a delayed diagnoses or mistreatment can give rise to serious detrimental consequences. It is therefore important that healthcare professionals help patients to manage the condition appropriately, or people may suffer to such an extent that they may have no alternative but to make a claim for medical negligence compensation.

In the simplest form, a medical practitioner may fail to spot the signs of diabetes and therefore fail to investigate that the patient may be suffering from the condition. This can mean patients do not undergo special tests required to diagnose diabetes, which may lead the condition to develop.

This can then put the patient at risk of serious complications.

In terms of mistreatment, there are guidelines and steps that help to control and monitor diabetes. If patients are not given the correct information or guidelines to follow to control their diabetes, this can have a detrimental effect on their lives.

Making a claim

It really is all about what symptoms were presented, and whether the medical professional had enough information to have a need to investigate diabetes. Diabetes can run in the family, so any information presented to a medical professional that includes the symptoms of diabetes, as well as there being an evidence risk of diabetes in the family, ought to be more than enough for investigations to take place.

Diabetes is relatively simple to test for and diagnose. Any failure to take appropriate action by healthcare professionals that leads to complications may give rise to claims for medical negligence compensation.