When you are injured or sick, you often rely on the care of hospitals and healthcare providers. The emergency room is the place most people turn to in the event of an unexpected injury or illness that requires immediate care and cannot be scheduled with your primary care physician or doctor. As convenient and necessary as emergency rooms might be, they are growing busier and busier every day. How does this impact the care you receive in an emergency room? Emergency rooms that are understaffed and overburdened with the task of caring for a great amount of people can cause a risk to the patients.
The National Institutes of Health have identified the leading health issues that are driving people to hospitals all across the country. One of these issues is the increase in volume of patients in an emergency room. Overcrowded emergency rooms can lead to the negligent care by healthcare professionals. In fact, there have been findings that some emergency rooms across the country are sometimes at more than double capacity.
You might not think that the number of people in the emergency room will affect the standard of care that you receive, but instead might just extend the length of your emergency room visit. This is not true. When hospital staff are overworked, they become more likely to commit common emergency room mistakes that could drastically affect your health.
Mistakes made by healthcare professionals tend to have more of an impact on one’s life than a mistake by the average person. This is because medical professionals are in charge of your health and well-being. A wrong diagnosis, missed symptoms and problems, or incorrect prescription medication can affect your health or even threaten your life. Mistakes made by healthcare professionals sometimes rise to the level of medical malpractice. Medical malpractice is a mistake, whether through action or inaction, by a healthcare provider that damages or injures a patient.
If you think that you are a victim of medical malpractice, a personal injury suit is a remedy available to you to collect compensation for the damages caused by your healthcare provider’s mistake. Not every mistake constitutes medical malpractice and it is important to speak with an attorney to find out if your case might be a case of medical malpractice. Compensation can include damages for lost wages, medical bills, pain and suffering, and many others.
The personal injury attorneys at Greg Baker, Attorneys at Law, PLLC are here to help you through a medical malpractice claim. We all want to be cared for by our doctors and other healthcare professionals so that we can recover from our injury or illness in a timely manner. Unfortunately, professionals can make mistakes that impact our lives in a negative way. Our attorneys want to get you the compensation you are entitled to under the circumstances to help you recover from the injuries caused by the doctor’s mistake. Contact us today in Clintwood at 276-926-7115 or in Wise at 276-321-8300 for a free consultation and to find out if you might have a medical malpractice claim.