Hospital Emergency Room Errors

Hospital emergency rooms are visited by nearly 100 million people per year in the United States.  The enormous volume of patients in critical condition, combined with a busy staff and a constant sense of urgency can result in medical errors.  While the emergency room is a highly demanding environment, it is still essential that hospitals and emergency room professionals provide a high standard of medical care to their patients.   If this standard of care is breached and injury or death results, such negligence may be grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Patients do not plan trips to the emergency room, so they can not make the same type of informed decisions that generally occur when they are choosing a health care provider or are considering treatment options.   The doctors and staff are not screened or evaluated by the patient.  The focus is simply to address the emergent healthcare need.   The doctors, nurses and other emergency room staff is responsible for making decisions and taking actions that can mean the difference between saving a life and causing death or long-term injury.  A mistake in this situation can have dire consequences.

Emergency room errors commonly result from:

• Failure to recognize a heart attack or stroke
• Failure to timely recognize and treat Acute Appendicitis
• Medication or prescription errors
• Failure to request necessary tests
• Failure to correctly interpret test results

Errors in the Emergency room can occur for many reasons.  Inadequately trained medical staff, including doctors and nurses, hospital staffing shortages, unsanitary conditions, a lack of updated medical equipment and technology and/or communication problems can lead to critical emergency room errors.  At times, it is the emergency room physician’s responsibility to contact or refer the patient to a specialist in order to best treat the patient and avoid mistakes.  Additionally, ER personnel must be responsible to ensure they do not discharge patients who are critically ill. 

A large percentage of all medical malpractice related injuries occur in the emergency room.  Medical malpractice or medical negligence occurs when a doctor, hospital, nurse or healthcare provider fails to give care that meets the required standard of care.

For more information on medical malpractice as the result of emergency room errors, please contact attorney Brett H. Oppenheimer, at his website brett@bluegrassinjury.com.