| When an emergency happens, we depend upon the emergency room staff for proper care. No matter what the symptoms, we expect the treating physicians and nurses to be able to accurately diagnose and take care of our complaint. However, studies indicate that over half of the deaths from medical malpractice related injuries in a single year result from emergency room errors.
It is not surprising that healthcare workers in an ER make mistakes. The treatment of medical emergencies is difficult even for those trained in that area of medicine. The staff must react quickly to changing circumstances while remaining calm. Fortunately, most of the errors made in the ER are caught by other members of the staff, and the patient does not suffer as a result of the error. However, many life-threatening mistakes that should have been caught are not detected in a timely manner.
Many medical errors are the result of understaffed hospitals or poorly equipped ERs. These errors include but are not limited to medication errors, prescription errors, bacterial infections, birth injuries, omission error, diagnosis errors, negligence, or patient "dumping."
In reaction to the problem of patient dumping, Congress enacted the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). This law provides that if a hospital has an emergency room and receives federal funding, it must provide an appropriate medical screening examination of any patient who arrives in the ER. The staff must determine whether or not an emergency condition exists and must stabilize that patient before transferring them to other facilities, with certain exceptions. EMTALA generally restricts the transferring of unstabilized patients, and it authorizes both civil fines and a private cause of action for violation of its provisions.
Although the United States Supreme Court has not ruled decisively on the question of whether an injured plaintiff making a claim under EMTALA must show an improper motive on the part of healthcare providers, it has concluded that the plaintiff seeking to recover for failure to stabilize his or her emergency condition is not required to show an improper motive.
Courts have found that EMTALA does not create a federal remedy for medical negligence, nor does it duplicate state laws regarding medical malpractice claims. Instead, it creates a separate cause of action that makes hospitals strictly liable for refusing emergency medical care on the basis of a patient's inability to pay. Copyright 2010 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |