Emergency Department Negligence

Emergency department negligence occurs because emergency departments are busy and often overcrowded places.

In rural and regional NSW in particular, the Ambulance Service, GP surgeries and hospital emergency departments do not always have sufficient resources to provide appropriate emergency care. There are not enough skilled doctors, nurses and other health specialists and professionals in our emergency departments resulting in numbers of avoidable poor outcomes each year.

Our health lawyers have run many successful emergency department negligence cases. Negligence can occur as a result of clinical errors, system errors, errors of judgement and/or communication.

Many medical negligence cases emanate from errors and/or poor care in emergency departments. 

Typical emergency department negligence cases include:

• delays in testing or treatment – failing to appropriately triage a patient or to send an ambulance or paramedic within in a reasonable timeframe
• failure to provide appropriate treatment – including discharging patients prematurely or failing to take a proper history, misdiagnosis or unreasonable delays in running tests or acting on test results
• inadequate record keeping and handovers
• incorrect prescription of drugs – prescribing the wrong medication or giving an incorrect dosage.