What Is The Statute Of Limitations For Medical Claims In Ohio?
Transcript
The statute of limitations in Ohio for a medical claim is the shortest statute of limitation for any claim in any state in the country… and it’s one year. Just to give you some idea, an automobile accident case would have a statute of limitation of two years, unless you were a minor in which case it would be until you were 20 years older (18+2). A contract action, if there’s a written document, may be a 10-year statute of limitations.
There are much longer statutes of limitation or time periods for filing for any other case other than medical malpractice and that was the result of the Ohio State Medical Association and the insurance industry lobbying the legislature to give them special protection against these claims. And so it’s one-year and then the question becomes when does that one year begin to run.
If it’s an obvious mistake where they cut off the wrong leg for example which really happens but if that were to be the case then it would be pretty obvious to the patient that a mistake had been made and it’s from the moment in time when the patient knows or should have known or should have been put on notice that somebody made a mistake – that’s when the one year begins run.
So, now there’s one exception to that and that is if somebody has died as a result of medical malpractice. There’s a two-year wrongful death statute of limitations that’s separate from the medical malpractice statute of limitations of one year.
So, and you can have both a one-year and a two-year statue at play. In a single case where somebody has been injured and had survived for a period of time as a result of the medical malpractice and then eventually dies, you would have a one-year statute for their individual claim up until the time they died and then you would have a two-year statute that would apply for the family members’ claims as beneficiaries or next of kin, family members for the wrongful death case.
So, the general rule is that it’s a one=year rule statute of limitations for medical malpractice.