Emergency Room Errors

If you’re in an emergency room, you probably don’t have any other options. In most cases, the emergency room is the last resort for an acute and potentially dangerous or deadly injury or illness. If you’re in an emergency room, you expect the medical staff and professionals to treat your injury like an emergency. If you suffer harm due to an error made in the emergency room, you could be permanently injured or worse. Just because it’s a fast-paced and sometimes unpredictable environment, that doesn’t mean that emergency room doctors and other medical professionals have the right to act negligently or dangerously. At the end of the day, they owe their patients a reasonable duty of care.

Failure to Properly Evaluate Patient

One of the biggest problems associated with emergency room errors is a failure to properly evaluate a patient. A patient can’t be accurately diagnosed and treated if he or she isn’t accurately and thoroughly evaluated. Rushing a patient through triage or evaluation can lead a failure to properly diagnose. At the very minimum, all patients should be thoroughly and appropriately evaluated. After all, if you’re in the emergency room, you’re probably in a pretty dire situation.

Infections Due to Unsanitary Conditions

Emergency room errors associated with unsanitary conditions can lead to dangerous infections in patients. Nobody wants to go into the emergency room with an injury and come out with an unrelated and potentially untreatable infection. With antibiotic resistance on the rise, there has never been a more important time to stick to high standards of cleanliness in healthcare settings, especially emergency rooms. Infections can be particularly dangerous for the very young, old or sick.

Failure to Diagnose or Delayed Diagnosis 

A failure to diagnosis or delayed diagnosis due to emergency room errors can delay critical and potentially life-saving treatments for patients. If you’ve been turned away from an emergency room with a so-called good bill of health, but you still feel ill or injured, it’s okay to ask for a second opinion. If a doctor or other type of healthcare provider was negligent in your treatment, evaluation or diagnosis, you could be in serious danger. If you don’t feel right, speak up and demand additional care or ask to speak with a different medical professional.

Wrong Medication or Dosage Given  

Another potentially frightening emergency room error occurs when the wrong medication or wrong dosage is given. Perhaps, a patient is given a medication that he or she is allergic to. If an inappropriate dosage is given, the medication can have damaging or even deadly side effects. Carelessness during medication dispensing can put lives at risk for injuries, suffering or worse. Some medications aren’t supposed to be taken until you get home, which means, you could be at home, potentially alone, taking a potentially dangerous medication. This type of error is caused by negligence and has no place in the emergency room, pharmacy or in any type of medical health care setting. If you suspect a wrong medication or inappropriate dosage was given and caused you harm, you need to contact a lawyer as soon as possible.