Unlike a visit to your regular doctor’s office, a trip to an emergency room will have you interacting with dozens of “strangers” whom you trust to provide quality care.
This is a highly stressful environment where the doctors and nurses are tending to dozens of patients at the same time, many of whom are in critical condition. With all that is going on, it is understandable that mistakes can be made that put a patient’s care at risk.
If you or someone in your family has suffered harm due to an emergency room mistake, it may be an actionable cause. That is when you need to involve the attorneys at McCoy & Hiestand, PLC. We can assess what happened and provide information about the options available to you to pursue a case.
We aim to assist all our clients in making informed decisions about their claims.
Emergency room errors fall under the category of medical malpractice. Before pursuing your claim, it will help you to understand the scope of these errors and determine which one pertains to your situation.
What Are the Most Common Emergency Room Errors?
A study published by the National Library of Medicine reports that approximately 130 million emergency department visits occur annually in the United States. That breaks down to around 25,000 annual visits per emergency room. Which of the following common errors have you suffered?
Long or Delayed Medical Treatment
Emergency room care is not provided on a “first come, first served” basis. Instead, treatment is provided based on the severity of the ailment or injury being presented. Upon entering the ER, you’ll go through an administrative and medical triage to determine if you need to be seen immediately or if you can wait.
Even if you are admitted and taken to the emergency department, you may still have to wait for care. A delay in treatment can lead to complications.
In this type of situation, you might only have an actionable claim if it can be established that the staff was negligent in attending to your illness or injury.
Diagnostic Errors
Diagnostic errors, such as with a pregnancy or a cardiac event, can lead to doctors administering the wrong course of treatment. The same study published by the National Library of Medicine found that 5.7% of ER patients received an incorrect diagnosis. That might seem like a relatively small number of incidents, but each one can have a severe impact on the patient.
Early Discharge
A diagnosis error is often associated with an early discharge from the ER. Patients can be sent home too early without fully dealing with their condition.
Medication Errors and Wrong Doses
Patients in an ER are often administered medication immediately to combat their condition. Unfortunately, in a rush to provide care, the attending physician could prescribe the wrong medication or the wrong dose.
Given the high volume of patients in a typical ER shift, mistakes can also occur when medicine prescribed for one patient is administered to another.
Poor Communication
In an emergency room, patients transition from triage to nurses to doctors. All symptoms are to be documented on a computer. It is also vital to take a patient’s complete medical history.
Along the way, a communication breakdown may occur. Poor communication can also happen if a patient is discharged without receiving adequate post-care instructions from the doctor.
Surgical Errors
In certain situations, an emergency room patient may require immediate surgical procedures. In this intense environment, the risk of surgical error increases.
Decision-Making Errors
Many ailments present with similar symptoms. It is up to the doctors to provide a differential diagnosis that eliminates potential problems, allowing them to focus on the real issue.
If there’s an error in their decision-making process, it can lead to harm to the patient.
Who Is Responsible for Emergency Room Errors?
If you intend to pursue a claim based on an emergency room error, you need to specify who exactly caused the error. The list of staff who will be part of your care team is a long one:
- Administrative assistant
- Certified nursing assistant (CNA)
- Charge nurse
- Emergency medical technician (EMT)
- Emergency room technician
- Laboratory technician
- Patient care technician
- Phlebotomist
- Physician assistant
- Receptionist
- Registered nurse (RN)
- Surgeon
- Trauma physician
- Triage nurse
- Unit secretary
Each of those positions can also be staffed by medical students in training, which can further increase the potential for an error.
Do You Need an Emergency Room Error Lawyer?
Processing what went wrong during an emergency room visit requires medical expertise.
The attorneys at McCoy & Hiestand, PLC, have a dedicated network of medical professionals that we call upon to help evaluate claims. That is how we determine if a case has merit, and we won’t proceed with the claim unless we are confident that we can prevail.
If you have been impacted by an emergency room error, we want to hear from you.
Call to schedule a consultation today.
