If you are reading this blog post, you may be contemplating speaking with an attorney about a medical/legal issue. When you talk with one, an important topic usually comes up, which is that if you are going to bring a claim you have to do it within a certain amount of time (usually 3 years). If you don’t, you are barred from bringing it.

For a while now, victims of medical negligence who were injured but did not die have had the option to extend this time limit by a year. This can be very valuable for such patients, as sometimes the injuries caused by medical negligence take months and even years to sort out.

However, until recently in Washington, if someone died as a result medical negligence, and her family wanted to bring a claim, they had to do it within 3 years, period.

Again, there are plenty of reasons why it may be important to have extra time, not the least of which is that often when a person dies as a result of medical negligence it is a surprise to her family, throwing an entire family’s life into turmoil. Bringing a claim takes a back seat to funeral arrangements, figuring out how to pay the bills, and grieving. It may be a year or two before a grieving widow decides to look into whether their loved one’s death was preventable, and the result of a medical error.

As of two weeks ago, such families have the same option of extending this time limit as victims who were only injured by medical negligence. While this may only seem like one small step for the rights of medical negligence victims in our state, to the family of the victim in this case, it was huge. And I’ll bet in the future, other Washington families will benefit from the common sense showed today by Washington State’s Supreme Court.

For your information, the case is called Fast et al. v. Kennewick Pub. Hosp. Dist. Et al.