Why Emergency Room Errors Are More Common Than Expected

Most people tend to trust their local hospital’s emergency room. They might not enjoy going to the regular doctor, but in a life-or-death situation, they believe the ER will save their lives. Unfortunately, ER errors are a little more common than you might expect. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why that’s the case.

Triage and the Nature of Emergency Medicine

One of the primary duties of the emergency room is triage, where they determine how severe a person’s medical issues are and make sure those people are seen first. It’s logical, of course, as someone having a heart attack who could die at any moment without proper care is objectively a higher priority than a sprained ankle or a torn ACL.

The problem with triage is that it’s done by humans, and humans occasionally make mistakes. Someone with severe chest pain might not be having a heart attack, but they’ll still probably be seen first, just in case. Similarly, someone with a pain in their abdomen might have a ruptured appendix, but if the person in charge of triage doesn’t realize it, the patient might wait too long to be treated and develop sepsis.

They also might not understand the severity of the situation for geographical reasons. Imagine a patient visiting Texas who goes to the ER with a severe sunburn. They’re from Alaska, which doesn’t get a lot of sun for most of the year, so their body isn’t used to it. However, the doctors in Texas have seen hundreds of sunburns every day, and they don’t think it’s a big deal.

The patient sits in the ER waiting room for two hours and eventually leaves after being ignored for so long. Later, it’s revealed that the patient had severe sun poisoning and could have died if they hadn’t sought medical attention shortly after returning to Alaska.

Medicine would be a lot easier if doctors and nurses could always tell what’s wrong with a person just by looking at them or reading their list of symptoms. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, which means human error (especially in triage) will always occur.

Inherently Chaotic Environment

Another major reason is that an emergency room is, by nature, a very chaotic environment. Everyone is constantly stressed out for obvious reasons. Patients are in a lot of pain and generally don’t know what’s wrong, and doctors or nurses know that a single mistake in a life-or-death situation can end up killing a patient.

A lot of people and information are constantly traveling back and forth at any given time, especially if it’s a busy night in the ER. A doctor or nurse who is handling five patients at the same time can easily get confused about what they heard or what the tests revealed. There are safeguards against this, of course, but it still happens.

In high-pressure situations, most people are prone to making mistakes. It can happen to anyone at any job, but an error in the emergency room is far more likely to cause serious harm or kill someone than a mistake on a written report to your boss.

Lack of Information and Communication Issues

When most people go to see their regular physician at a scheduled appointment, that doctor has usually seen them multiple times and will have a lot of notes from those meetings to jog their memories. Although mistakes can happen, they’re usually pretty rare.

On the other hand, emergency room patients have several things working against them, especially if they’re traveling and have never been to that particular hospital. The ER doctors won’t be as familiar with the patients and are mostly going off of what they can see and what the patients tell them. ER patients who are in pain might not remember critical information, like an allergy to Amoxicillin that they found out about 20 years ago.

In some cases, an ER patient might not be able to communicate effectively with the medical staff. A young child, someone who only speaks Italian or another language unknown to anyone at the hospital, unconscious people, or a person with a concussion might not be able to say their own names, let alone where it hurts or how long ago it happened.

If that happens, the doctor often has to use their best judgment to figure out why their patient is in pain. A non-English speaker pointing to his head could be referring to any number of conditions, and if it’s not possible to get a translator, the doctor has to guess.

Emergency Room Errors and What to Do

If you or someone you know may have experienced an emergency room error, there are a few things you can do. First, make sure you document everything. Keep your discharge paperwork and the names of any prescriptions you receive handy in case you need to show them to someone later on.

Next, schedule an appointment with your regular physician as soon as possible. Tell them what happened, the diagnosis you received, and why the treatment isn’t working. They can run their own tests and will likely be able to determine a better course of action.

In severe cases, you may need an experienced medical malpractice lawyer like the attorneys at McCoy & Hiestand, PLC. Even if you think the mistake was understandable or not that severe, you shouldn’t have to pay for further medical treatment due to a hospital mix-up. That’s why every doctor has malpractice insurance, because patients shouldn’t risk financial ruin every time they walk into an emergency room.

Final Thoughts

Although most people have a high level of trust in emergency room doctors, they do still make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes can be severe enough to seriously injure or even kill a person. If it’s a rare condition that the doctor hasn’t seen before, if they can’t communicate effectively with their patient, or if things get extremely busy and they make an error, patients can end up paying the consequences.