Emergency Room Malpractice
Emergency room errors include medication and diagnostic mistakes made by doctors and nurses misreading symptoms. With doctors and nurses rushing from patient to patient, it’s easy for important information to be missed. An oversight, like a skipped question or misjudged symptom, can have long term impacts ranging from a delayed diagnosis to death.
Whether it’s due to a shift change or a rush of critical patients, poor communication between doctors and nurses is a major factor in emergency room errors, including extra time in the hospital, delay in treatment, or death. A spotty medical history or lack of access to lab reports or test results often means that emergency room doctors are making health calls without all the necessary information. Even technological upgrades like entering patient information into electronic medical records can leave gaps; when hospital staffers enter information into the system, they don’t always follow up with others, so symptoms can end up going unnoticed.
The most frequently reported emergency room errors are medication errors, as reported by the National Coordination Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention. Medication errors are mistakes such as incorrect doses, an incorrect prescription for condition, an incorrect prescription for the patient (due to medical history or conflict with current prescriptions), or poor monitoring. A medication error can be caused by misdiagnosis, or just misreading a chart or label. Overcrowding and the chaotic rush of emergency rooms can contribute to such mistakes.
Emergency room errors can start as small as an increased wait time due to overcrowding or a delay in giving an appropriate diagnostic test and end up as serious as a misdiagnosis or incorrect prescription.
Sepsis, strokes, and lung cancer are some of the serious health conditions that are commonly misdiagnosed. Some factors resulting in misdiagnosis could include misreading symptoms, missing medical history, or making assumptions about who is at risk for that kind of ailment. Patients under 50 experiencing stroke symptoms like vertigo, nausea, or numbness can be misdiagnosed because strokes usually affect older people (75% of strokes occur in people 65 or older).
Read More: Failure to Diagnose and Treat Infections / Sepsis
Read More: Missed or Failure to Diagnose Cancer or Other Illness
Another example of potential misdiagnosis is meningitis. Meningitis symptoms are commonly mistaken for the flu, but headache, fever, sensitivity to bright light, double vision, neck stiffness, and dizziness can be signs of this serious bacterial infection.
Appendicitis, and pulmonary embolism also are commonly misdiagnosed, and have been linked to emergency room error.
Like meningitis, appendicitis and pancreatitis can easily be mistaken for more mild ailments until the condition has turned serious and potentially deadly. The abdominal pain, nausea, tenderness, and vomiting that are indications of appendicitis (inflammation of the appendix) are also can be indicative of pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas). Emergency rooms should always treat appendicitis as an immediate emergency. lf appendicitis is misdiagnosed or left untreated, it can result in a ruptured appendix, serious infection, and potentially fatal complications. While most people with acute pancreatitis will see a full recovery within days (with rest, hydration, and pain management), more serious inflammation or cases of acute pancreatitis can lead to infection, breathing problems, kidney failure, or death. Chronic pancreatitis can also lead to diabetes, chronic pain, malnutrition, and even pancreatic cancer. It’s crucial for both appendicitis and pancreatitis that doctors diagnose the condition correctly and treat it accordingly, but these two ailments often reslut in emergency room diagnostic errors.
Learn more about pancreatitis here: Pancreatitis: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment
Finally, another common type of emergency room error is when a physician fails to diagnose a patient with the imminently fatal condition of a pulmonary embolism. A pulmonary embolism is a blood clot in one or more of the arteries in the lungs that have broken off from the veins elsewhere, usually in the legs or abdomen. This clot travels through a patient’s bloodstream, becoming lodged in the lung’s arteries, thus restricting blood flow to the lungs and subsequently lowering oxygen levels and increasing blood pressure. The symptoms (including shortness of breath, chest pain, coughing) of a pulmonary embolism are often subtle and like other more common conditions.
Learn more about pulmonary embolisms here: Pulmonary Embolism: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment
Because a pulmonary embolism can kill someone within a matter of minutes if not treated with anti-clotting medications, anytime someone is complaining of chest pain or difficulty breathing, a pulmonary embolism must quickly be ruled out by health care providers in the emergency room. The failure to do so may constitute medical malpractice.
If you or a loved one has been affected by emergency room malpractice, it is critical to have an informed, detail-oriented, and dedicated medical malpractice attorney who will tirelessly advocate for you and your case.
For a free consultation, please contact Silverman Thompson’s medical malpractice lawyers Andrew G. Slutkin and Ethan S. Nochumowitz, at 800-385-2243.