Yes, inadequate emergency room care may warrant further legal actions if patients were harmed because of a healthcare provider's negligence. In 2021 alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded about 139.8 million emergency room visits across the US. Among these incidents, 40 million were related to injury-inducing events.
Of all these reported emergency room visits, only about 41.8% of patients were given medical attention during the first 15 minutes of arriving in the emergency facility. Overcrowding and understaffing have remained to be a very pressing issue within the United States healthcare system. This issue has persisted over the last several decades.
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In a nutshell, medical facilities and professionals may be held accountable for any actions/inactions that cause patient harm. Through a properly established medical malpractice claim, victims may be compensated for all damages they've incurred, ensuring that they can properly bounce back from such unfortunate events.
Can You Sue for Inadequate ER Care?
You can pursue a malpractice claim if inadequate emergency room care caused you serious harm. To have a viable case, you generally need:
- Negligent care: The ER staff failed to act as reasonably careful emergency clinicians would have under similar circumstances (for example, negligent triage, missed diagnosis, or improper treatment).
- Significant medical harm: That failure led to a serious injury, such as stroke progression, heart damage, sepsis, organ failure, or other preventable complications.
- Measurable damages: You have documented losses including additional hospitalizations, procedures, long-term disability, lost wages, or death.
Not every bad ER outcome is malpractice. Some serious conditions progress despite appropriate care, and an expert review of the records is usually needed to tell the difference.
When Inadequate Emergency Room Care Becomes Malpractice
Inadequate emergency room care becomes malpractice when an emergency department provider fails to meet the professional standard of care for triage, diagnosis, or treatment and that failure causes avoidable harm. In legal terms, you generally need a negligent act or omission, an injury, and resulting damages such as additional treatment, disability, lost income, or death.
Emergency medicine is fast-paced and high-risk. Unlike scheduled office visits, ER clinicians must make rapid decisions with limited information. However, they must still act in line with accepted emergency medicine practice. When providers fall below this standard and patients suffer preventable harm as a result, a malpractice claim may be warranted.
What Are The Most Common Reasons for Emergency Visits?
Through the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, researchers were able to identify the most common reasons for emergency visits in the US in 2018. These reasons are provided below. Note that the percentage of both outcomes (treat-and-release and needed hospitalization) come from different sampling populations.
| ISSUE/CONDITION | TREAT-AND-RELEASE | NEEDED HOSPITALIZATION |
|---|---|---|
| Injury and Poisoning | 20.1% | 10.0% |
| Abnormal Signs/Symptoms | 16.0% | 2.4% |
| Respiratory System | 11.5% | 11.9% |
| Musculoskeletal System | 7.8% | 2.2% |
| Circulatory System | 7.0% | 18.0% |
| Digestive System | 6.8% | 13.3% |
| Genitourinary System | 6.0% | 6.7% |
| Nervous System | 4.4% | 3.5% |
| Skin and Subcutaneous | 3.7% | 2.6% |
| Pregnancy/Childbirth | 2.8% | 3.1% |
| Ear and Mastoid Process | 2.2% | 0.2% |
| Infectious/Parasitic | 1.9% | 10.3% |
| Nutritional/Metabolic | 1.6% | 5.0% |
| TOTAL | 91.8% | 89.2% |
Given the diversity of issues that come into the emergency department, facilities must have impeccable systems in place. Only properly designed policies would allow them to provide patients with adequate urgent care. When mishandled, these issues can go downhill fast. Even the slightest misdiagnosis can lead to very adverse outcomes.
Common ER Mistakes That Lead to Serious Harm
Emergency medicine is fast-paced and high-risk, and recurring error patterns show up in malpractice data and clinical literature. Common inadequate ER care scenarios include:
- Missed or delayed stroke diagnosis: Failing to recognize stroke symptoms, delaying brain imaging, or not activating stroke protocols promptly can lead to preventable brain injury.
- Missed or delayed heart attack (MI): Under-triaging chest pain, delaying ECGs or troponin testing, or misreading results can delay life-saving treatment and cause avoidable heart damage.
- Missed or delayed sepsis: Failing to recognize infection with organ-dysfunction signs, not ordering appropriate labs, or delaying antibiotics and fluids can allow sepsis and septic shock to progress.
- Delayed imaging or lab testing: Long delays in CT scans, MRIs, or critical labs when red-flag symptoms are present can contribute to diagnostic errors and worsened outcomes.
- Discharging too soon: Sending patients home without an adequate workup, diagnosis, or clear warnings about when to return can lead to deterioration at home and later emergency rehospitalization.
- Medication errors in the ER: Wrong drug, wrong dose, or giving a drug despite a documented allergy, as well as missing critical medications such as anticoagulants or antibiotics.
- Monitoring and handoff failures: Not checking or acting on abnormal vital signs, or poor handoffs between triage, physicians, and inpatient teams, are recurrent themes in ER-related malpractice claims.
| ER Mistake Category | Illustrative Scenario | Why It Leads to Claims |
|---|---|---|
| Missed stroke/MI | Chest pain triaged as low priority, hours-long delay to ECG/CT | Time-sensitive conditions need rapid workup and treatment. |
| Missed sepsis | Fever and low BP treated as "flu" and discharged | Failure to recognize and treat sepsis early. |
| Delayed imaging/labs | Severe headache but delayed CT, aneurysm rupture at home | Delay in critical diagnostics. |
| Premature discharge | Discharged with vague diagnosis and no clear return precautions | Inadequate workup and safety-netting. |
| Medication or monitoring errors | Wrong dose of sedative without adequate monitoring | Direct drug-related harm plus monitoring failure. |
Systemic Factors That Contribute to Medical Malpractice
Several systemic factors can contribute to malpractice in the emergency department. Addressing these systemic issues requires a multi-faceted approach, including adequate resources, training, communication, and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement. These systemic factors include:
- Overcrowding
- Staff shortage and fatigue
- Inadequate protocols for care
- Inadequate training and supervision
- Technological/equipment issues
- Time constraints
- Unnecessary interruptions/distractions
- Professional biases
Remember that facilities and professionals who are responsible for your well-being may be sued if inadequate/subpar care is provided for you. These lapses provided above are known to harm patients in the long run. It is the responsibility of every medical facility to mitigate such lapses through rigorous policy development.
Common Types of Emergency Room Errors
Recognizing common errors in the emergency department is crucial when developing policies. This recognition in turn is crucial for enhancing patient safety and quality of care in emergency departments.
Some of the more common errors in emergency departments include:
| ERROR | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis | Failing to accurately identify a patient's condition or taking too long to reach a correct diagnosis, potentially leading to inappropriate or delayed treatment. |
| Medication errors | Administering the wrong medication, incorrect dosage, or failing to account for drug interactions or allergies. |
| Inadequate patient monitoring | Not properly monitoring a patient's vital signs, symptoms, or response to treatment, which may cause a delay in recognizing and addressing complications. |
| Discharge errors | Prematurely discharging a patient without appropriate follow-up instructions, prescriptions, or failing to identify and address potential red flags. |
| Inadequate testing or imaging | Failing to order necessary diagnostic tests or misinterpreting test results, leading to missed or delayed diagnoses. |
| Procedural errors | Making mistakes during procedures such as intubation, central line placement, or wound care, which can cause harm to the patient. |
| Infection control lapses | Failing to adhere to proper infection control protocols, such as hand hygiene or sterile techniques, increasing the risk of healthcare-associated infections. |
| Communication failures | Breakdowns in communication between healthcare team members, such as inadequate handoffs or documentation, leading to gaps in patient care. |
| Triage errors | Incorrectly prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition, potentially causing delays in treatment for those with more urgent needs. |
| Failure to obtain informed consent | Not properly explaining risks, benefits, and alternatives to procedures or treatment, or failing to obtain a patient's informed consent before proceeding. |
What You Must Prove and What Records to Collect
From a malpractice framework standpoint, ER cases use the same basic negligence structure (duty, standard of care breach, causation, and damages) but applied to emergency conditions.
What You Must Prove
To establish an emergency room malpractice claim, you must demonstrate:
- Provider-patient relationship: There was a provider-patient relationship in the ER, so the hospital and emergency clinicians owed you a professional duty of care.
- Breach of standard of care: The ER team did not act as carefully as reasonably competent emergency clinicians would have under similar circumstances (for example, they did not triage appropriately, failed to order or interpret tests, or discharged you unsafely).
- Causation: Because of that substandard care, you were worse off than you otherwise would have been. For instance, you suffered more extensive brain injury from a stroke, greater heart damage from an MI, or progression of sepsis.
- Damages: You suffered damages that the law recognizes, such as additional medical costs, lost income, long-term disability, pain and suffering, or death.
Expert witnesses usually compare what happened to accepted emergency medicine standards to decide whether care fell below the standard. These medical experts review your records, the timing of interventions, and the clinical decision-making process to determine if negligence occurred.
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What Evidence Matters
To build a strong emergency room malpractice case, you should gather the following records and documentation:
- Emergency room visit records: Complete ER chart, including triage documentation, nursing notes, physician notes, orders, and vital-sign flowsheets, which show what staff knew and did over time.
- Triage notes and acuity scores: Initial triage assessment, vital signs, assigned priority level, and any changes. These are key in triage-error claims.
- Lab and imaging records with timestamps: Order times, collection times, result times, and when clinicians reviewed and acted on results, crucial for missed stroke, MI, and sepsis cases.
- Medication records: What medications were ordered and administered in the ER, at what doses and times, and any documented allergies or interactions.
- Discharge paperwork and instructions: Discharge diagnosis, follow-up plan, prescriptions, and "return immediately if" warnings, which show what you were told and whether the discharge was safe.
- Subsequent medical records: Hospitalizations, surgeries, or specialist care after the ER visit, which help establish how the outcome would have differed with adequate emergency care.
Establishing Liability and Compensation Figures
Four key elements must first be pinpointed and established before any claim is rendered valid. Medical malpractice experts typically work with trusted medical consultants during this initial investigation. These four key elements are:
- Duty of Care: Was there an appropriate doctor-patient relationship?
- Breach of Duty: Did your doctor perform poorly/negligently based on accepted standards of care?
- Causation: Did your doctor's actions/inactions directly cause you harm?
- Damages: What did these errors cost you?
Apart from establishing your claim, the responsibilities of your medical malpractice lawyer include gathering pieces of evidence, officially filing your case, and negotiating for your compensation.
Latest figures from the National Practitioners Data Bank show that there have been 11,248 payments made for medical malpractice in 2023, 1,219 of which were made in the state of New York alone. These NY-based malpractices amounted to about $416.23 million. In 2023, the average compensation for medical malpractice in New York was around $481,191.
All medical expenses (past and future) are accounted for in all medical malpractice claims. Apart from medical bills, other economic and non-economic losses are also factored in. Lost income, emotional trauma, and decreased quality of life are some of the more common inclusions. Please refer to our previous wins for actual compensation figures.
Next Steps If You Suspect Negligence
If you suspect inadequate ER care, here are practical steps to take:
- Obtain and preserve records: Request your ER records, imaging, labs, and discharge paperwork as soon as possible so they are available for review.
- Write down your timeline: Note your symptoms, when you arrived, when you were seen, what tests were done, and when you were discharged.
- Continue appropriate medical care: Follow up with appropriate specialists and follow their treatment plan to protect your health and document ongoing harm.
- Avoid guessing in insurer or risk-management interviews: Stick to facts if you must talk with insurers and consider consulting counsel before giving detailed recorded statements.
- Have an experienced malpractice lawyer review your case: ER cases are expert-intensive and typically require careful review of records, timelines, and causation before filing suit.
FAQs
Can You Sue a Hospital for Inadequate Care?
Yes. A patient can bring a malpractice claim against a hospital when its staff or agents depart from accepted medical standards and that departure causes injury, including in the emergency department. Whether an ER doctor is treated as a hospital employee or an independent contractor can affect how a claim is structured, but hospitals may still face liability under various theories depending on the jurisdiction and facts.
What Percentage of ER Doctors Get Sued?
Emergency medicine is one of the higher-risk specialties for malpractice claims. A survey cited by emergency medicine organizations found that roughly half of emergency physicians reported having been named in a malpractice claim at least once during their careers. Earlier national physician surveys reported emergency physicians among the specialties with the highest claim frequencies, with annual claim rates around 8-9% in some datasets.
What Is an Example of Negligence in a Hospital Setting?
An example of hospital negligence would be failing to appropriately triage and evaluate a patient with classic stroke symptoms, leading to hours-long delays in imaging and treatment and resulting in avoidable brain injury. Other examples include medication errors (such as administering a drug despite a documented allergy) or discharging a patient with unstable vital signs and no clear return precautions.
What Is the Most Common Reason Patients Sue Their Doctors?
Studies of malpractice claims highlight missed, delayed, or incorrect diagnoses as a leading allegation, particularly in emergency and primary-care settings. Research on patient motivations also shows that patients often sue to obtain an explanation and accountability, and communication breakdowns and perceived "cover-ups" are major drivers of litigation decisions.
What Is the Emergency Rule in Negligence?
In tort law, many jurisdictions recognize an "emergency" or "sudden emergency" principle: a person confronted with a sudden, unexpected emergency not of their own making is judged by how a reasonably careful person would respond under those emergency conditions, rather than under calm circumstances. In medical malpractice, this idea is reflected in discussions of how the standard of care is applied in emergency settings, where clinicians must make rapid decisions with limited information, but they must still act in line with accepted emergency medicine practice.
Did You Receive Inadequate Care During Your Last Emergency Visit?
Reach out to our team to know your legal options (free and non-obligatory).
Speak to a Medical Malpractice Lawyer Today
At the Porter Law Group, our team of proven medical malpractice lawyers delivers ideal results. We take pride in helping families rebuild after unfavorable circumstances. We operate on a contingency basis, meaning you do not need to pay us anything unless we win your case. Through this approach, we can better support families during their times of need.
If you or a loved one has been a victim of medical malpractice, please reach out to us for a non-obligatory free case evaluation. You can also contact us at 833-PORTER9 or info@porterlawteam.com to schedule a consultation.
