Emergency Medicine is very hard work!

By: Jim Bleeke
BleekeDillonCrandall

Over the past few weeks, I have met with six different emergency room doctors to discuss wrongful death cases filed by their patients. Although we are defending these lawsuits, we certainly are very sympathetic to the emotional losses the families of these patients have experienced. The doctors who we represent are almost always very sad for everyone involved when one of their patients does not survive. I have been struck in my initial client meetings with these doctors at just how difficult the job of an emergency room physician truly is.

Patients come to emergency rooms with every potential medical problem that exists. Some are very serious. Many are not. The patients do not wear a sign on their chests or have a stamp on their foreheads pointing to which body system is actually causing their symptoms. For example, burning chest pain could be caused by indigestion or a heart attack; or breathing difficulty could result from a common cold or life-threatening pneumonia. Emergency room physicians get one chance to sort out the myriad health problems that could be the patient’s problem and help them with their acute problem or point them to the right consultant for further care.

When an emergency room patient dies, the physician who saw them very often second-guesses themselves and questions what else they could have done. I try to counsel my clients in this situation that nothing can bring the patient back or change the unfortunate outcome. All the doctor can do is learn from the experience, even if their actions were entirely reasonable, and hope that some future patients (and other doctors and nurses) will benefit from the negative experience of that patient and the doctor who treated him or her. As Joyce Meyer says, “Your mess is your message.” Maybe someone else will benefit from the difficult experience of those doctors not being able to save that patient.