Emergency Room Errors

By: Tara Pingle

Doctors and supporting staff face an unpredictable and constantly changing array of serious medical problems which they must assess and handle quickly. Hospitals have a duty to maintain the safest possible conditions in emergency rooms, in order to minimize the chance of errors and injury to patients in this naturally chaotic environment.

Emergency room errors can be caused by many forms of hospital negligence or wrongdoing including:

· Failure to maintain an adequate number of doctors and support staff per shift
· Inadequate training
· Failure to screen doctors and support staff
· Inadequate record keeping procedures
· Inadequate patient tracking procedures
· Inadequate medication administration procedures
· Inadequate facilities
· Unsanitary conditions
· Unethical policies

Every decision and every action taken by every person who works in an emergency room can mean the difference between saving a life or causing long-term injury or death. One mistake can have catastrophic consequences. Common emergency room errors include:

· Failure to fully evaluate a patient
· Failure to fully treat a patient
· Failure to monitor a patient
· Delayed diagnosis, misdiagnosis, failure to diagnose
· Medication errors
· Laboratory errors
· Contaminated blood transfusions
· Surgical errors
· Negligence
· Delayed treatment
· Patient dumping

Hospitals can minimize the risk of errors by maintaining clear and consistent policies and procedures for record keeping, patient tracking, administering medications, and sanitation. Policies and procedures only work when followed up with training and enforcement. In a high stress environment, all of these elements are necessary to keep things running smoothly.

Understaffing results in doctors and support staff who are tired, overworked, and sometimes simply must choose who to treat and who must wait for treatment. This leads to misdiagnosis, delayed, incomplete, or total lack of treatment, failure to monitor unstable patients, and a myriad of simple human mistakes which can have deadly results.

Unsanitary conditions cause infections which can mean a longer and more painful recovery period, loss of limbs or organs, unnecessary long-term medical problems, or death.

“Patient dumping” is an unforgivable, unethical practice which often results in death. When patients are unable to prove their ability to pay for treatment, normally by providing insurance information, some emergency rooms will refuse to treat them, provide partial and inadequate treatment, or delay treatment until it is too late. During a medical emergency, when patients are too incoherent to provide financial information and are not accompanied by loved ones who can provide the information for them, many emergency rooms which practice patient dumping simply let them die.

If you or a loved one has been the victim of emergency room error, resulting in injury or death, you may be entitled to compensation including:

· Current and future medical bills
· Current and future loss of wages
· Rehabilitation
· Long-term disability
· Long-term care expenses
· Pain and suffering
· Loss of enjoyment of life
· Loss of companionship
· Burial expenses

A trip to the emergency room is not a choice. Patients do not have the opportunity to screen and evaluate emergency room doctors and staff and make an informed choice on whose hands they place their lives in, as they would when choosing a physician or surgeon under normal circumstances. Yet, emergency room treatment may be the most important and extreme medical attention a person ever receives.