Standards of Care, Explained

The standard of care is what a reasonably prudent provider, with similar training and in similar circumstances, would have done. It's not a single fixed rule — it's a judgment applied to a specific set of facts, which is exactly why it needs to be evaluated by someone who can read those facts clinically.

Standards are drawn from a mix of sources: professional guidelines and protocols, hospital and facility policy, peer-reviewed literature, and what similarly credentialed providers would typically do in that specific clinical situation.

Part of the analysis is identifying which of those sources actually applies — a hospital policy that wasn't in effect at the time of care, or a guideline written for a different patient population, doesn't help the case either way.

Establishing a deviation means comparing what was actually documented against what the standard required, then identifying whether the gap between them is defensible clinical judgment or a departure from accepted practice.

That comparison only works if it's grounded in the record — not a general sense of what 'should' have happened, but specific orders, specific timestamps, and specific documentation measured against a specific standard.

I'm not the one who testifies to a standard-of-care opinion at trial — that's the retained expert's role. What I do is the groundwork: identifying the applicable standards, flagging where the record shows a deviation, and building the documentation your expert needs to form and support that opinion.