Emergency rooms are where people go when primary care offices are closed. They are also the right place to seek care after a major traumatic incident that requires immediate hospitalization. Emergency rooms typically provide 24/7 access to emergency care and can help patients quickly secure admission to the hospital.
The professionals staffing emergency rooms have training on how to handle sudden surges in demand and how to evaluate the people seeking care. They try to rapidly assess patients when demand exceeds available space or staffing. Typically, they prioritize those with the greatest need and the greatest likelihood of responding to treatment.
The decisions made by emergency room workers can directly influence an individual’s chances of making a full recovery after experiencing a medical emergency. Unfortunately, the professionals working in emergency rooms frequently make mistakes as they attempt to diagnose patients.
Millions of emergency room errors occur annually
According to an analysis of emergency room care, mistakes when diagnosing patients are quite common. CNN reports that more than seven million diagnostic mistakes occur in emergency rooms in the United States every year. That figure represents roughly 6% of the people seeking emergency room treatment or one in 18 patients.
Many factors contribute to that high level of diagnostic failure. Some medical professionals don’t have training on how to recognize conditions that present differently in men and women. Other times, emergency room employees allow their personal bias to affect how they treat patients with certain personal characteristics. Implicit racial bias, for example, might contribute to an emergency room worker dismissing self-reported pain symptoms because of a patient’s appearance.
Communication errors are also a key contributing factor to diagnostic errors in emergency room settings. Workers may fail to add critical notes to charts or to communicate with one another. They may also rush through the process of communicating with the patient, resulting in them jumping to conclusions without all of the necessary information.
When emergency room professionals make diagnostic mistakes, people in dire need of care do not receive the treatment they require. Patients affected by diagnostic errors and families grieving preventable deaths may have grounds for medical malpractice lawsuits. Reviewing the conduct of emergency room professionals can help people determine if an actionable diagnostic error occurred.