If you’ve been harmed in an emergency room setting, the medical professionals who treated you can be held accountable for the harm they’ve caused. Let the attorneys from Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck, P.C., help you do so.
Our lawyers have extensive experience handling emergency room error cases, and our notable medical malpractice case results include millions of dollars recovered for our clients. Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation. We’ll assess your case to determine whether you have a viable medical malpractice claim and, if so, how we can pursue it on your behalf.
Common Emergency Room Errors
Common mistakes made in the emergency department include the following:
- Medication Errors – Doctors unfamiliar with a patient’s medical and physical history may prescribe contraindicated medications. Nurses may also administer medication to the wrong patient.
- Misdiagnosis – Misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, or failure to diagnose a patient’s condition can occur for many reasons. Doctors may fail to examine a patient in a timely manner, while labs may have delays in processing diagnostic tests. Medical staff may discount a patient’s complaints, doctors or nurses may not take down an adequate patient history or conduct a complete physical examination, or doctors may misinterpret test results.
- Delayed Treatment – Long wait times in emergency rooms due to overcrowding, understaffing, and triage errors can prevent patients from receiving treatment when they desperately need it.
- Premature Discharge – Emergency departments sometimes prematurely discharge patients before stabilizing their condition, either through misdiagnosis or attempts to mitigate overcrowding by moving patients out of the ER as quickly as possible. Such premature discharge frequently leads to patients returning to the hospital in worse condition.
- Errors During Medical Procedures – Negligent mistakes during medical procedures in the ER can severely injure patients or cause life-threatening health complications. Mistakes during IV needle insertions, intubations, or tracheostomies are particularly hazardous.
- ER-Acquired Infections – Inadequate cleaning and hygiene procedures in the emergency room may cause patients with compromised immune systems to contract potentially dangerous viral or bacterial infections while in the ER.
- Failure to Follow Up – Healthcare professionals should follow up with patients about their symptoms and explain warning signs of potentially serious issues requiring further treatment. When they fail to do so, patients might misunderstand important symptoms and suffer health complications.
Factors That Contribute to Emergency Room Errors
Certain circumstances unique to emergency departments contribute to a higher risk of serious errors. The following are some factors that increase the likelihood that emergency room doctors will make a dangerous mistake.
High-Pressure Environments
Emergency departments are often chaotic and crowded, especially in busier hospitals serving large cities and suburbs. Furthermore, patients come to the emergency room without appointments or warning, usually with pressing medical conditions. In many cases, patients in the emergency room suffer from life-threatening injuries or medical emergencies requiring ER staff to drop everything to treat and stabilize those patients.
As a result, emergency rooms are high-pressure environments for doctors and nurses alike. Doctors may have to jump from patient to patient, trying to keep track of each patient’s wildly different situation. Medical staff may also have to limit the time spent on each patient’s case as a result of overcrowding and understaffing, and these time limitations may negatively affect patient outcomes.
Doctors and nurses must often make life-and-death decisions for patients who have potentially fatal injuries or are experiencing medical emergencies. The pressure of the emergency room environment can easily lead healthcare staff to make careless errors that put patients at risk of injuries or severe complications.
Lack of Familiarity with Patients
In a traditional medical office, doctors have scheduled appointments with patients for whom they have detailed medical records and whose health issues and overall physical conditions they know from past visits.
Emergency room doctors and staff do not have this luxury and typically treat patients they have never met. As a result, doctors and nurses may not have much information about a patient’s medical history, including their:
- Blood type
- Medications
- Chronic illnesses
- Past injuries
- Health problems
- Past symptoms or complaints that may be connected to the reason for their ER visit
Without this information, ER doctors may prescribe medications that have adverse interactions with the patient’s current medications. They may also lack knowledge of a patient’s symptoms or other clues in their medical history that could point them toward the correct diagnosis.
Emergency room staff’s lack of familiarity with their patients may cause them to make erroneous diagnoses or treatment decisions, which may injure the patient or cause severe complications.
Poor Communication
Successful treatment of emergency room patients requires the many medical professionals in the ER to communicate effectively with one another and with the patient. Many errors are the result of poor communication, such as the following:
- ER staff failing to conduct a thorough patient history evaluation, leaving doctors without the information they need to diagnose and treat the patient’s condition
- ER staff dismissing a patient’s subjective complaints out of hand as an exaggeration or part of drug-seeking behavior
- ER staff failing to deliver post-discharge instructions, including the follow-up care the patient should continue at home or the troubling symptoms they should watch out for
- ER staff failing to communicate during hand-off procedures, such as when triage nurses relay patient information to doctors or when patients remain in the ER through multiple staff shifts
When ER staff fail to communicate clearly and effectively, they may miss vital patient information that would otherwise allow them to provide a reasonable standard of care.
Contact Our Experienced Medical Malpractice Attorneys for a Free Consultation Today
If you’ve been hurt because of an emergency room error, you need experienced legal representation to help you seek justice. Contact Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck, P.C., for a free case evaluation with a medical malpractice lawyer to learn how we can hold those responsible for the substandard care to account by filing a medical malpractice lawsuit on your behalf.
BUSINESS INFORMATION
Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg, & Jeck, P.C.
1634 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA, 19103
Phone: (215) 585-2814
Email: info@erlegal.com
