Emergency Room Malpractice

Kirby & Holt – Attorneys for North Carolina Emergency Room Errors

Emergency room medicine involves serious challenges to the skill and attentiveness of its physicians and nurse practitioners, and most ER professionals render outstanding service on a daily basis. Sometimes, however, an avoidable mistake in the emergency room can cost a patient his or her livelihood, capacity for independent living, or even life.

Contact the North Carolina medical malpractice lawyers at Kirby & Holt in Raleigh if you believe that a loved one suffered a serious or fatal injury as the result of an emergency room doctor's mistake. Our initial consultations are free and confidential.

Sometimes serious medical accidents can occur as the result of administrative problems at a hospital, as in a case we handled in which a man suffered a heart attack leading to a coma after a wait of more than two hours at an emergency room - his apparent lack of health care insurance evidently delayed his admission. Other emergency room errors we have handled include:

• Death of a woman whose EKG showed she was having a severe heart attack, but received no treatment for an hour.
• A teenager who suffered blindness after his eye infection was misdiagnosed and mistreated. 
• Death of a woman when she went to the hospital with chest pain, and was sent home with only a prescription. She died of a heart attack 30 minutes later.
• Death of man when his heart attack was misdiagnosed as musculo-skeletal pain.
• Death of a man whose abdominal aortic aneurysm was misdiagnosed as constipation. He was sent home and died 6 hours later.

As in all other medical malpractice cases, the determination of the defendant's liability in an emergency room error case stands and falls on the ER physician's compliance with the appropriate standard of care. We work closely with medical experts, including experienced emergency room physicians, to determine whether a doctor or nurse’s treatment violated the standard of care.

When it appears that we can establish liability on the basis of an emergency room physician's negligence, the medical malpractice attorneys of Kirby & Holt then analyze all of the circumstances of our client's injuries and losses so that the most complete damages information possible can be presented to an insurer, or a jury, for compensation.

Our attorneys handling emergency room errors have an excellent record in achieving settlements and jury verdicts for our clients. For further information about our ability to help your family, contact the North Carolina emergency room negligence lawyers at Kirby & Holt in Raleigh.