Emergency Room Error

The emergency room is the last place anyone wants to be, but is sometimes the patient’s only hope. Life and death hang in the balance and a patient usually has no choice but to trust the physicians and nurses who tend to them. Emergency rooms are chaotic, stressful, and exhausting environments for even the most well-trained medical professionals. What happens when a mistake is made, one that either costs the patient’s life or leaves them with a serious, debilitating injury or disease? If you or a loved one have been the victim of a medical mistake, you’ll need a skilled emergency room error lawyer. Rikard & Protopapas is here to serve you and your family. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals — including those who are on staff in emergency rooms — make mistakes. The law does not expect or require these individuals to be absolutely perfect. This is especially true in the crowded, busy, and demanding circumstances found in emergency rooms. Healthcare professionals have to make snap decisions, often with limited information, and often in desperate situations. However, this doesn’t excuse what the law considers to be negligence. Medical professionals have a legal obligation, known as a duty of care, to avoid acts or omissions that can foreseeably cause harm to patients. This is where medical malpractice comes in. More than simply an error, malpractice occurs when the professional’s acts or omissions deviate from accepted standards of medical care and cause injury to the patient. Emergency room malpractice, therefore, happens when the practitioner’s mistake is unreasonable, falls short of the accepted standard of care, and results in patient harm. A knowledgeable emergency room error lawyer will be able to demonstrate that another, similarly situated doctor, nurse, or other healthcare provider would have acted differently. When you retain Rikard & Protopapas as your emergency room error law firm, we get to work investigating the circumstances that led to your injury. It starts with evaluating your medical condition before, during, and after treatment. We also look at how you were treated by the emergency room staff in terms of medical attention, diagnosis, protocols that were taken (or not), and the quality of the treatment you received. Additionally, our firm considers factors that might have contributed to the malpractice.