Emergency rooms are busy places. ER staff members, nurses, and doctors have challenging decisions to make. They must prioritize who gets treatment given the resources available in the emergency room at the time.
If you were hurt by a long emergency room wait, or a family member died because of an emergency room delay, you may pursue a lawsuit against the hospital if the wait was caused by nursing home negligence. Proving ER negligence can be difficult, but not impossible.
Prepare for Obstacles in Delay in Treatment Cases
As you and your lawyer work on building your case, you must be aware of potential obstacles to your fair recovery, such as:
- Gathering evidence. The emergency room has control of a lot of the evidence you will need to prove your case. For example, in order to determine if the delay was negligent, you will need to know details such as how busy the emergency room was when you arrived, how many nurses and doctors were working, and whether the emergency room followed its intake policies and procedures.
- Proving the delay was negligent. You can only recover damages if your delay in treatment was negligent. In other words, the time it took to treat you must have been longer than the time it would take to treat you in a reasonable emergency room given similar circumstances. To prove that the delay was negligent, you need to know exactly why it occurred.
- Proving your injury was the result of emergency room negligence. You will likely need a doctor or medical expert to testify or provide a written statement that you were hurt because of the delay in emergency room care and not because of the condition for which you sought treatment.
You should expect the hospital’s lawyers to prepare every possible defense and to fight hard to protect their client. Our experienced delay-in-treatment lawyers can do the same for you. Let us investigate your case, prepare your claim, and anticipate the obstacles that could get in the way of your recovery if you aren’t prepared.