The emergency room in a hospital is often a busy and chaotic environment, where many people are left sitting and waiting for long periods of time. Patients may wait for hours to be seen, while their condition continues to gradually worsen.
In fact, emergency rooms have become much more crowded in recent years. When Dr. Bruce Fagel practiced emergency medicine (he practiced for approximately 10 years in Illinois and California), emergency rooms were basically at that time the entrance point for patients to come into the hospital. Many patients did not have doctors and came in with various types of problems. Patients came in as walk-ins and from ambulances and were seen in a more timely fashion. In more recent years, emergency rooms have become very overcrowded. One of the biggest problems with emergency rooms at this point is the long waiting time.
Patients wait a long amount of time to either be seen initially or after being seen by a physician, waiting for a bed in the hospital. Medical negligence may occur because the patient's underlying medical problem may require immediate attention; unfortunately the emergency room or medical staff isn't capable of recognizing or meeting these demands. Patients will deteriorate, conditions will get worse, right in front of doctors in the emergency room, simply because once they've been seen by the emergency room physician, evaluated and determined they need admission to the hospital, they are left waiting in the hallway, where they wait for a bed in the intensive care unit. So we see a lot more problems these days in emergency rooms due specifically to the problem of overcrowding and that has created a tremendous strain on the hospitals. It's also very difficult for patients who go to emergency rooms to get the kind of adequate treatment they deserve.
This type of overcrowding also causes ER doctors and nurses to become overworked. Emergency rooms are often understaffed. With these types of conditions in place, negligence becomes a fairly common occurrence in emergency rooms throughout this country.
Examples of emergency room negligence:
- A patient left waiting too long while a medical condition worsens
- Nursing or doctor errors
- Failure to diagnose the medical condition
- Misdiagnosis of the medical condition
- Medication errors
In some cases, ER medical negligence may lead to a catastrophic injury or even death for the patient.
