What are your expectations when you go to the emergency department? Why did you go to this particular emergency department? The answers to these questions may be quite important in the event you are injured by medical malpractice by the emergency room doctor.
In a majority of cases, the choice of hospitals in the event of an emergency is an easy one. The closest one wins. There are occasions, however, when the patient has a choice and specifically chooses a hospital that is not the closest. Even when proximity of the emergency department is an important consideration, EMT’s and patients will often bypass small hospitals that may not have full service emergency departments in favor of a larger, better-equipped hospital a little further away. When this happens, the reputation of the hospital receiving the patient may be an important factor in the choice of where to go.
The reason this may be important in the event of a medical error is that almost never will the emergency department doctor be a direct employee of the hospital. Almost every hospital in the state of Arizona has outsourced the staffing of its emergency department. The hospital will have contracted with a company that provides emergency department doctors to staff its ER. The company then hires doctors, schedules them and pays them for the shifts they work. Because the hospital does not itself employ the ER doctors, it is not legally liable for them as employees. However, it may be legally liable for them, if the hospital gave the patient a reason to believe the ER doctor was an employee and the patient chose the hospital on the basis of its reputation for having good quality health care providers. If the hospital is not legally liable for the ER doctors, a patient injured by a medical mistake made by the ER doctor will be limited to whatever amount of malpractice insurance the ER doctor has. This usually will not exceed $1M. The hospital on the other hand will usually have many, many millions of dollars of insurance coverage.
Hospitals go to great lengths to avoid having to pay for medical mistakes by the doctors working in their emergency departments. The contracts they have with the companies that staff their ER’s specifically provide that the ER doctors are not direct employees of the hospital, but are instead “independent contractors” for whom the hospital is not legally liable. The doctor himself or herself may have a contract with the staffing company which states that the doctor is not an employee of the staffing company either, but is an independent contractor.
The hospital will have the patient or the patient’s representative sign “Conditions of Admission.” This document is dense and full of legal jargon. It is presented to the patient on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No negotiation is permitted. Under the circumstances, most patients never even read the document and would probably have a difficult time with all the legalese, even if they did take the time to try and read and understand it.
The Conditions of Admission will almost always inform the patient that not every doctor or health care provider the patient might encounter in the hospital is a hospital employee and caution the patient against assuming it is dealing with a hospital employee. It will inform the patient that, just because a doctor has on a name badge with the hospital’s name prominently displayed, does not mean that the doctor is an employee. It will claim that the badges are only a security measure. It will be up to the patient to figure out who is an employee and who is not in the event of an injury.
Given the severity of the injuries that can occur in a hospital emergency department, $1,000,000 does not go very far in fully compensating those who are seriously injured. Just be aware that the hospital is not going to stand behind the doctors it allows to work in its emergency department. It is not going to compensate those who are injured by these doctors, even though they are fulfilling a vital and vitally important hospital function. As with so much else in medical malpractice, when it comes to an injury caused by an avoidable medical mistake in the emergency department, you are going to be pretty much on your own.
