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A visit to Accident & Emergency can be stressful and chaotic. You generally hadn’t expected to be there and you don’t have a choice about the doctor you see. Accident & Emergency doctors can be anything from A&E consultants who have lots of Accident & Emergency experience to newly qualified registrars. Some have very little emergency medicine experience and are at a greater risk of making mistakes or being unable to diagnose your condition.

Medical negligence can involve an act of omission or an act of commission. An act of omission means that the doctor failed to do something he or she should have done. This can include failing to diagnose a condition based on symptoms you have that are obvious for one disease or another. An act of commission means the doctor did something, such as a procedure, that was unnecessary and that led to physical or emotional damage to you. Both can lead to a solicitors A&E medical negligence claim.

Emergency medicine is a unique area of medicine. The doctor you see tends not to have your personal history and often doesn’t have the medical records from your doctor’s surgery to know exactly what medicines you are on and what procedures and tests you’ve had in the past. This means it is up to the patient to tell the doctor everything necessary to make a diagnosis. It means you tell the doctor your pertinent medical history, the history of the symptoms and whether or not you have had them before, your current medications, and medication allergies. If you fail to give the doctor the right information, you may not be able to make a medical negligence compensation claim against the Accident & Emergency doctor if something goes wrong.

Medical negligence compensation claims can be made against the doctor, the hospital or both, depending on what happened and what went wrong. Sometimes the hospital is negligent for employing an inexperienced doctor in the first place and sometimes the hospital is negligent because of a procedure that went wrong. The doctor can be negligent for failure to make a diagnosis, especially if another skilled doctor would have logically made a correct diagnosis, ordering a test or procedure that causes you harm or providing you with a treatment or medication that causes you harm. In almost all cases a medical negligence compensation claim is made against the organisation that runs the hospital and employs the medical staff.

If you have a bad outcome in Accident & Emergency, you need to seek the advice of a medical negligence solicitor. This is a solicitor who is knowledgeable in medical issues and who can search through the issues related to your case to see if, in fact, you have a case. If you think you have suffered from medical negligence, you should make a complaint to the hospital. They may be able to put right what happened. If you are not happy, you need to seek the advice of a solicitor in order to know what your legal options are.

The Accident & Emergency department of any hospital is a chaotic place, which is ripe for medical mistakes. The doctors are often seeing more than one patient at a time and there are often life and death issues going on in the Accident & Emergency department. Doctors have the goal of seeing you as quickly as possible and sending you out with measures that will at least temporarily manage your problem until you see your regular doctor. It may involve giving you pain relief, setting a bone, diagnosing a pain you cannot explain, or stitching a cut or laceration. While your past medical history and medication list is important, doctors may be too busy to actually take the time to look these over and mistakes can be made. Any Accident & Emergency department is a uniquely risky place to get healthcare.

You shouldn’t see an Accident & Emergency doctor for something that is truly not an emergency and Accident & Emergency areas are not good places for primary care. The doctor can’t spend the time and effort with you that you may need. It is not the job of the Accident & Emergency doctor to focus on minor ailments that are non-urgent so you cannot sue an emergency doctor for failing to deal with trivial items, unless your symptoms are reasonably severe. Accident & Emergency care can be tenuous and fraught with mistakes. It is not a good setting to receive thorough medical care so you should be your own advocate when it comes to knowing what to tell the doctor, what procedures to accept and what questions you need to ask when it comes to getting the right kind of care.

Our specialist medical negligence solicitors are able to deal with a wide range of personal injury claims. If you've been injured as a result of negligence by a healthcare professional, we can help you to preserve your legal right to compensation. We offer free consultations for advice to find out whether you have a good case, how to go about claiming and how much your compensation might be worth. We will give you clear unequivocal advice about your chances of success and the anticipated value of your claim. If after talking to us you decide not to take your medical negligence compensation claim further you are under no obligation to do so and you will not be charged anything at all.