Q: If hospital and doctors fail to treat life threatening wounds, or address pain, is this elder neglect??

A: Typically, it is difficult to maintain an action for medical malpractice due to a patient's inability to schedule an appointment. In a true medical emergency, the patient should go to a local emergency room or call 911 for paramedics to assess and transport the patient to a hospital. It is just not possible to prove that a doctor's acts or omissions fell below the standard of care if the doctor has not seen and is not treating the patient.

I understand and appreciate the difficulty in scheduling a health care appointment by phone. It is a time-consuming hassle that I usually avoid by scheduling my follow-up appointments in office at the end of each visit or by scheduling appointments online through my healthcare providers' web portals and apps. I find that a lot of younger office staff strongly prefer not to speak with patients and customers by telephone so returning telephone calls is often very low on their priority list.

A: You could reach out to attorneys to try to arrange a free initial consult. For the matter of neglect, it does not sound like the hospitals or doctors were designated in a role of caretaker or similar capacity. The problem in such a phone setting that transpires over a course of years is that there will likely be conflicting accounts of what was said. See if you could arrange a free initial consult with a law firm to discuss further. Despite the absence of a person-to-person live setting, it does seem like a failure in a system that should have addressed something as serious as an 8-inch wound. Good luck