If you went to the emergency room at a hospital in Miami or Florida and were misdiagnosed or underwent unnecessary procedures, please contact our law firm and we will gladly evaluate your situation.
Annually, 8.7 million people visit the emergency rooms in Florida hospitals, but numerous of these visits result in medical malpractice and misdiagnosis. The constant interruptions emergency room physicians experience are linked to a predisposition to committing medical errors.
Researchers found that the average local hospital emergency room doctor in Miami may treat as many as 12 patients at once and interact with up to 101 individuals in a period of 2 hours. In Florida, the average length of time spent directly with the patient was found to be only 6 minutes, as compared to 55 minutes spent on indirect care. These frequent interruptions cause ER physicians to rapidly switch tasks, therefore leaving work incomplete.
Emergency room negligence in Florida is usually serious, as people do not end up at this hospital department unless they are experiencing very serious symptoms. Therefore, if emergency room physicians do not take proper care when interpreting test results and when assigning a diagnosis, they may fail to identify the true cause of the patient’s problem, which can cause terrible long-term health issues or even death.
In Miami and throughout Florida, failure to treat internal bleeding - bleeding that occurs inside the body - is among the most common forms of medical malpractice. Internal bleeding left untreated can lead to serious complications.
Internal bleeding may be caused by:
When someone is involved in a motor vehicle accident or suffers from painful symptoms, they are taken or arrive at a local ER. Internal bleeding is a medical emergency that should be treated as soon as possible. But in an ER setting, often, the complaints of patients are misread or ignored by the hospital staff. This can happen because internal bleeding is more difficult to recognize than external bleeding.
Less obvious causes left untreated can also result in internal bleeding. These include organ damage, gastritis, or a bleeding disorder.
When such a medical error occurs, the patient’s condition will continue to deteriorate. The patient may even be discharged too early, without getting treatment. Sometimes, diagnosis correction and treatment come too late. In such circumstances, the patient may suffer permanent damage, such as paralysis or even death and the hospital may be liable for medical negligence.
Internal bleeding may occur in the:
Regardless of the underlying cause of internal bleeding, to prevent serious harm, doctors must treat this medical condition immediately.
If you, or a loved one, suffered a serious injury as a result of medical negligence involving internal bleeding, you have the right to seek compensation from those responsible. Contact the experienced Miami medical malpractice attorney at The Law Offices of Sean M. Cleary for a free consultation.
Hospitals, where infections are left untreated in their emergency departments, may be liable for injuries.
If you suffered a serious infection associated with treatment in the ER, it's important to determine whether any medical errors took place, such as:
Diagnosing and treating an infection requires doctors and nurses to identify the signs and symptoms of infection, communicate, investigate with lab tests, and properly treat it. Prompt diagnosis and action are especially necessary to avoid or cure sepsis, a systemic blood-borne infection, which has a significant mortality rate.
When medical providers fail to diagnose or erroneously diagnose serious infections, these can quickly get worse, leading to serious injury or death. Victims or their surviving family members have the right to seek monetary compensation for the damages suffered.
At The Law Offices of Sean M. Cleary, our dedicated medical malpractice lawyer has been helping patients and families throughout Florida for over 20 years. Give us a call today for a free consultation.
If doctors neglected to diagnose and treat a condition that resulted in the loss of an arm or a leg, you have a right to be compensated.
The most common types of traumatic events that lead to amputation include:
When medical professionals act negligently and they're doing so results in the loss of a limb, there may be a case for medical malpractice. Examples of medical negligence that lead to loss of limb cases include, but are not limited to:
If you, or a loved one, suffered an injury due to medical malpractice, you may be entitled to compensation for medical bills, rehabilitation expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, loss of consortium, and other damages. Contact us today, Miami law requires you to file a lawsuit within two years of the injury.
5% of the people visiting the emergency department are there because of pain in their abdomen and as many as 10% of patients in the ED have a serious or life-threatening cause of pain or require surgery. Therefore, doctors, nurses, and staff members need to pay attention to give an accurate diagnosis that may even be life-saving. Abdominal pain can be challenging to diagnose:
Studies show that failure to diagnose an illness at initial evaluation can lead to complications and surgery that initially may have been unnecessary. The location of the pain is the starting point for further evaluation. But evaluating abdominal pain requires an approach that relies on:
Failure to diagnose appendicitis is too common and can have dangerous consequences. Appendicitis left untreated can cause peritonitis and sepsis. When faced with appendicitis symptoms, health care providers can make some common errors that include:
Sometimes, an initial failure to diagnose can result in later errors or additional procedures, including follow-up surgeries with their attendant risks. Failure to diagnose correctly and medical errors may constitute medical malpractice.
Doctors who are seeing a patient with signs and symptoms of bowel obstruction should act promptly because left untreated can result in perforation of the organ. Usually, the treatment is surgery to clear the obstruction. The consequences of bowel perforation may include sepsis. Sepsis, in turn, must be diagnosed and quickly treated because if it progresses, antibiotics may no longer be efficacious and the patient can die. Failure to correctly diagnose and treat bowel obstruction may constitute medical malpractice.
Pancreatitis is a disease in which the pancreas becomes inflamed. Acute pancreatitis is marked by stomach pain, increased heart rate, vomiting, fever, etc. Medical professionals are trained in detecting pancreatitis through physical exams and laboratory testing, but cases exist where the proper standards diagnostic protocols weren’t followed. Medical professionals can be held accountable for the harm suffered due to a failure to accurately diagnose, including the pain of undergoing procedures that weren’t necessary.
When patients report to the emergency room with indications of abdominal pain, they may suffer from other serious conditions that require immediate correct diagnosis, such as:
Doctors are expected to notice the signs and symptoms of a serious condition but, oftentimes, they and the hospital staff, miss the existence of intracranial bleeding in patients coming to the ER. A doctor’s failure to diagnose a health problem can cause an otherwise treatable issue to become a threat to the patient's life.
Hemorrhagic strokes are rare but can be very dangerous. A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain bursts or ruptures. Given the severity of the stroke, doctors must work quickly and skillfully. That is not always what happens, unfortunately.
Hemorrhagic strokes are associated with two main causes:
Internal bleeding is commonly treated by lowering a patient’s blood pressure. Usually, the patient is given drugs, but when they don't work, doctors perform surgery. However, surgery can be dangerous. If not performed with the appropriate care and precision, the patient can be injured for life.
Failure to correctly diagnose stroke or aneurysm in time could result in severe complications that lead to surgery or require other procedures that, otherwise, may not have been necessary. In the worst-case scenario, undiagnosed intracranial bleeding can lead to death.
If you, or a family member, have been wrongfully discharged from the hospital through emergency room error, doctor mistake, or other negligence, we can help you hold the medical professionals accountable for their failure to diagnose intracranial bleeding.
When you're rushed to the hospital emergency room with pain in the chest area, tightening in arms or shoulders, shortness of breath, and nausea, these may be symptoms of a heart attack.
It is the duty and responsibility of the hospital ER team to properly diagnose and treat you. Diagnosing a heart attack commonly includes, but is not limited to:
Many women are frequently released from the ER without being properly diagnosed or treated although they present with heart attack symptoms. Often, women do not experience chest pain with a heart attack. Based on the lack of chest pain, they are commonly released from the ER. In many instances, doctors simply do not conduct diagnostic tests.
The chance of surviving a heart attack depends on the treatment you receive within the first hour of the heart attack. Therefore, failure to diagnose a heart attack can have devastating consequences and can even result in death.
When ER medical personnel fails to diagnose a heart attack and the result is injury or death, we can help the victim or the legal heirs pursue monetary compensation.
When you go to the emergency room in Miami, regardless of the health issue that is bothering you, you will go through the following steps:
The most common emergency room errors resulting in medical malpractice in Florida hospitals are misdiagnoses. Additionally, emergency room malpractice may also stem from:
Since Florida’s emergency rooms are overcrowded, patients may often not be admitted or given the proper priority their condition requires. Therefore, the health of the patient can deteriorate quickly. Another error that may result in medical malpractice concerns the test results which, if not interpreted correctly or in a timely manner, may cause the emergency room to discharge the patient too early. It is also not uncommon for emergency rooms in Miami and Florida to have a 4-hour wait time before patients can see a doctor and sometimes, this can extend up to 8 hours or even more.
Regardless of the extent of your injury, our attorney, Sean M. Cleary, will gladly review your emergency room medical malpractice case and offer you the legal advice you need. By filing a case against the medical professionals who were responsible for your injury, you will receive the financial compensation you deserve for your physical and emotional distress and the liable party will also be held accountable for their negligence.
Oftentimes, a hospital in Florida as a whole, rather than a medical professional, may be held responsible as the employer of the negligent medical professional. While any hospital in Miami or Florida is accountable for the actions of the medical staff they employ, many doctors work as independent contractors, and therefore the hospital may not be liable for their negligence. However, in a situation involving the emergency room, it may not be clear to the patient whether a doctor or a nurse is an employee of the hospital or an independent contractor.
If you, or a loved one, were a victim of emergency room medical malpractice, we strongly encourage you to consider filing a claim against the hospital or the responsible medical professionals. With the legal assistance of our attorney, you will be able to recover the maximum amount of financial compensation you are eligible for, which will cover:
If you experienced any injury because of a procedure that took place in the emergency room, if you were sent home with a serious health issue or if you were misdiagnosed, do not hesitate to discuss your legal options with our Miami-based medical malpractice lawyer, who specializes in medical malpractice cases.
Since these situations are highly technical matters, they require insight and counsel from a skilled legal professional. Our firm is prepared to represent clients throughout Miami and Florida in all types of medical malpractice cases, delivering legal services of the highest quality.
Because we are a local law firm, we know how to work with local hospitals, other lawyers, as well as insurance companies to make sure you will receive the compensation you are entitled to.
In areas of practice such as medical malpractice, it is important to seek legal advice as soon as possible after realizing you were injured due to a medical professional’s negligence, since failure to file a claim in a timely fashion may forever prevent legal recourse.