Georgia Hospital Infection Law: 2026 Changes

The ground is shifting under our feet in Georgia when it comes to medical negligence, and if your practice handles hospital-acquired infections, you need to pay attention. A major change in 2025 has completely altered how plaintiffs must build a hospital infection malpractice lawsuit by tightening the evidence they need upfront. The new requirements in O.C.G.A. Section 51-1-29.5 demand a much higher level of specificity for expert affidavits in these nosocomial infection cases. The question is, are you ready to meet this new bar?

New Evidentiary Standards for Medical Malpractice Claims

The big change to Georgia’s medical malpractice law, O.C.G.A. Section 51-1-29.5, kicks in on January 1, 2026. This law directly affects hospital infection cases by raising the bar for the expert affidavits you have to file with the complaint. Before, it was often enough for an expert to say the care didn’t meet the local community standard. The revised law kills that. It now clearly requires the affidavit to show a deviation from the national standard of care for doctors and hospitals. This is a critical distinction, especially in a field like infection control where national guidelines from bodies like the CDC are the coin of the area.

This all came from Senate Bill 101, which passed in the 2025 session and was signed by Governor Brian Kemp. Supporters of the bill argued that a national standard just makes sense because modern medicine and evidence-based practices are so widespread, particularly in fighting infectious diseases. Of course, opponents were worried that it would be too hard for plaintiffs to find experts who could speak to a single national standard that applies to a huge academic center and a small rural hospital. My take? The legislature wanted to weed out weak lawsuits but keep the door open for strong ones, but what they’ve really done is put a much heavier lift on plaintiffs to find the perfect expert right out of the gate.

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So, an affidavit that just says a Fulton County hospital didn’t follow “generally accepted practices in Atlanta” is now dead on arrival. Your expert has to get specific, showing how the hospital’s conduct fell short of, for instance, the national guidelines for hand hygiene or failed to follow established national protocols for central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) prevention that come from organizations like the CDC or the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA). This means you need a complete, well-researched, and frankly bulletproof expert opinion from day one.

Who Does This New Law Impact?

This change to the statute hits everyone involved in a Georgia medical malpractice case where a hospital infection is the core of the claim. This includes:

• Plaintiffs and their lawyers: If you’re representing someone harmed by a hospital-acquired infection, your expert’s affidavit must be locked into the national standard of care. Getting this wrong could get your case tossed before you even get to discovery.
• Hospitals and doctors: On the defense side, this is a new, powerful tool to challenge a plaintiff’s case from the start. Defense counsel will be going over these affidavits with a fine-toothed comb.
• Expert witnesses: If you’re an expert giving an opinion, you have to frame it in the context of national standards, showing you’re familiar with the consensus and guidelines that apply everywhere, not just some local custom. Experts have to be incredibly precise with their language and the basis for their opinion.

And don’t get tripped up by the timing. The key date is January 1, 2026. Any lawsuit filed on or after that day falls under the new rule, even if the infection itself happened in late 2025. This transition means every attorney thinking about filing a med mal case in Georgia has to adapt right now. You can’t wait until the last minute to find an expert who gets this. For these cases, the era of just calling a local doctor to opine on local standards is pretty much over.

Concrete Steps for Legal Practitioners

With these updates to O.C.G.A. Section 51-1-29.5, you have to adjust your strategy for medical malpractice cases involving hospital infections. Here are some real-world steps to take:

For Plaintiff’s Counsel:

1. Early Expert Engagement: Find and hire your expert witness way, way earlier than you used to. You’re looking for someone who can prove they know national infection control guidelines inside and out, think infectious disease specialists, hospital epidemiologists, or nurses with deep experience in major medical centers where national protocols are standard operating procedure.
2. Thorough Affidavit Preparation: Make sure the expert’s affidavit specifically and repeatedly references the national standard of care. It should point to specific national rules (like the CDC’s CAUTI prevention guidelines or the WHO’s Global Hand Hygiene Guidelines) that the hospital or doctor violated. A simple claim of deviating from “good practice” is worthless now.
3. Cite Specific Guidelines: The affidavit must connect the dots, showing exactly which national guideline was broken and how that breach caused your client’s hospital infection. Vague statements about a “failure to prevent infection” won’t survive a motion to dismiss. For example, your expert needs to be able to say, “The hospital’s failure to follow the CDC’s 2024 Guidelines for Prevention of Surgical Site Infection, specifically recommendation 3.1 for skin prep agents, was a direct cause of Mr. Smith’s staph infection.”
4. Anticipate Challenges: Expect a motion to dismiss based on your affidavit’s sufficiency. This new law gives the defense a much bigger stick to swing.

For Defense Counsel:

1. Scrutinize Plaintiff Affidavits: The second a complaint comes in, tear apart the expert affidavit. You’re looking for any hint that the expert is relying on a local standard or fuzzy “general practices” instead of the required national standard under O.C.G.A. Section 51-1-29.5.
2. File Motions to Dismiss: If the plaintiff’s affidavit is weak on the national standard, file to dismiss immediately. Make sure to argue that the whole point of the 2025 amendment was to raise this exact evidentiary bar on plaintiffs.
3. Educate Healthcare Clients: Tell your hospital clients they need to get serious about documenting how they follow national infection control protocols. This means having training logs, audit results, and compliance reports ready to go. Doing this work upfront can build a strong defense later.
4. Expert Witness Selection: If the case moves forward, make sure your own experts can clearly explain how your client *did* meet national standards, giving you a powerful counter-argument.

Courts like the Fulton County Superior Court will be setting the first precedents on this new standard. Lawyers in the Atlanta circuit especially need to be on top of this. I fully expect a wave of motions to dismiss in early 2026 as both sides feel out the limits of this law. Winning or losing these cases will come down to who has a better grasp of the national standard of care and can argue it through their experts.

The change to O.C.G.A. Section 51-1-29.5 completely changes the game for medical malpractice claims over a hospital infection. Lawyers have to change how they build these cases, focusing on rock-solid expert testimony that is grounded in national standards. You need to get ready now to stay compliant and protect your clients.