Birmingham Emergency Room Error Attorney
People usually go to the emergency room when they are suffering a serious medical emergency that requires prompt attention. But with many patients’ lives on the line in an ER, frantic emergency room doctors may be more likely to make errors. These errors can result in serious injury or even death. If you have been injured by errors committed by emergency room staff, you deserve to seek financial recovery for the harm you’ve suffered.
At Serious Injury Law Group, our Birmingham emergency room malpractice lawyers give you and your case the personalized attention you deserve. When you’re recovering from medical complications caused by emergency room negligence, you need attorneys who are responsive and respectful of your time.
Our legal team can meet with you wherever may be most convenient for you, including at your hospital bedside or in your home. Our attorneys are Alabama natives who work hard to give back to our community, supporting local organizations, schools, and charitable causes to do what we can to make our community a better place to live.
Contact Serious Injury Law Group today for a free initial case review to discuss how a Birmingham emergency room error attorney from our firm can help you pursue financial compensation when you’ve been harmed by the negligent or reckless actions or omissions of emergency room healthcare professionals.
Common Types of Emergency Room Errors
Emergency rooms can easily become very busy and chaotic after a sudden emergency. This chaos creates the perfect environment for ER staff to make an error with a patient’s care. Some of the most common examples of emergency room errors include:
- Ignoring or overlooking a patient’s reported symptoms
- Failing to take a complete patient history
- Failing to perform a full examination
- Emergency room misdiagnosis
- Medication errors
- Triage errors, or failing to recognize that a patient requires immediate medical attention
- Premature discharge
- Delayed treatment
- Failing to order diagnostic tests
- Misinterpreting test results
- Failing to provide a patient with discharge/follow-up instructions
What Injuries Are Related to Emergency Room Errors?
An emergency room error can result in serious or potentially life-threatening injuries for a patient. Our firm can help you pursue accountability and justice when you’ve suffered emergency room error injuries, such as:
- Internal bleeding
- Stroke or heart attack
- Brain aneurysm
- Pulmonary embolism
- Appendicitis
- Hospital-acquired infections
- Broken bones
- Soft tissue injuries
Many of these injuries result from a patient receiving delayed treatment. This might be due to a failure to properly triage and get the patient seen by a doctor more quickly. In other cases, it might be due to a misdiagnosis that can result in the patient being improperly discharged. Oftentimes, the patient ends up right back in the hospital when their condition turns for the worse. Other injuries occur when a patient is improperly moved by hospital staff, such as moving from a stretcher to a bed or rolling the patient over.
How to Determine Liability for Emergency Room Errors
Not every emergency room error constitutes medical malpractice that will support a legal claim for compensation. To demonstrate your entitlement to compensation following an emergency room error, you will need to show that the care you received at the ER fell below the accepted standard of care and that this substandard care caused you to suffer injury and incur compensable losses.
In medical negligence cases, the accepted standard of care is usually defined as the treatment and decisions that other healthcare professionals of similar training and experience would have provided under identical circumstances. In other words, if other providers would have treated you the same way, the law will not hold ER staff legally liable even if you ended up suffering an adverse outcome following your ER care.
In most cases, you will need to rely on your medical records as well as the opinions of medical experts to establish liability for an emergency room error. Experts will provide an opinion regarding the applicable standard of care in your case and how the ER staff’s conduct failed to comply with that standard.
Can You Sue an Emergency Room for Negligence?
Emergency room errors are often committed by the staff who work in the emergency room, but you may wonder whether you can bring a negligence claim against the emergency room or hospital.
Many staff members in an emergency room, including nurses, orderlies, and administrative assistants/desk attendants, are employed by the hospital. Therefore, you can generally file suit against the hospital because employers are generally responsible for the negligence of their employees. You might also be entitled to assert a claim of direct negligence by the hospital for negligently hiring, training, or supervising employed staff members who commit errors.
Doctors who work in an emergency may or may not be employed by the hospital. Many doctors who work in hospitals work as independent contractors, meaning the hospital may not be subject to employer liability when those doctors commit errors in the ER.
However, even if an emergency room error is committed by a doctor employed as an independent contractor, the hospital may still be subject to liability for its own negligence in hiring or credentialing the doctor if that doctor posed a risk of injuring patients.
How Our Birmingham Attorneys Can Help You
If you have been the victim of an emergency room error, the Birmingham attorneys of Serious Injury Law Group can help you with a legal claim against those responsible for your injuries by:
- Thoroughly investigating your claim, including recovering your medical records along with other important evidence, such as surveillance or medical videos, treatment notes, or staffing records.
- Collaborating with medical experts to help put together a persuasive case that shows how your treatment fell below the applicable standard of care and how you were injured by it.
- Identify potentially liable parties and putting together demand letters to begin the process of negotiating a fair and full settlement.
- Aggressively pursuing maximum compensation for you by putting in the time and work necessary to achieve the best possible outcome in your case, even if that means taking your case to trial.
When you’ve been injured due to the medical malpractice of emergency room staff, contact Serious Injury Law Group for a free, no-obligation consultation. We can discuss your legal rights and options for seeking financial recovery for your injuries and losses.