Sadly, in this era of predominantly corporate health care, many hospital emergency rooms and urgent care units are understaffed, cost-conscious and focused on rapid “throughput.” Preventable mistakes in this setting can be devastating or fatal. If you strongly believe that you or a family member was victimized by ER malpractice, you should speak with a lawyer who has the experience and resources to explore your legal options.

Some catastrophic emergency room errors can be traced to an individual’s negligence or carelessness. Many others result from problems with hospital systems and policies, ranging from failure to properly triage, cumbersome intake procedures, inadequate training or supervision, inefficient communication or failure to work as a team, failure to implement treatment protocols and more.

Broad examples of ER negligence that may be actionable include:

• Failure to recognize symptoms of an impending, life-threatening event such as a heart attack or stroke
• Inadequate assessment of patients with closed head injuries that pose the risk of permanent brain injury, failure to diagnose abdominal pain that could precede a ruptured appendix, or another failure to diagnose an emergent or life-threatening medical condition
• Erroneous charting, failures to review patient histories and other problems leading to drug reactions or interactions, discharge of patients who should have been admitted, and other unacceptable mistakes

When we believe in a case and know it is worth pursuing, we enlist the most qualified experts to provide credible medical opinions and teach a jury why our client should win.