Time matters in medical care because it can prevent a treatable condition from becoming a life-threatening emergency. A delay in cancer diagnosis or treatment, for instance, can allow the cancerous cells to spread, which limits treatment options and reduces survival rates. Hospitals often lose critical time that compromises patients’ wellbeing at the registration and initial assessment desk, laboratory, operating room, and discharge section. When a patient gets harmed due to a treatment delay, hospitals rarely admit to it. Instead, they often downplay the impact of the delay to avoid liability and medical malpractice lawsuits.
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You may have a medical malpractice case if you suffered an unfavorable health outcome because of a hospital delay. This is especially true if the delay was unreasonable and a deviation from the accepted medical standard of care. A careful review of your medical records can reveal if the delay was unjustifiable and an act of negligence.
Call Ankin Law at 312-600-0000 for legal help if a treatment delay has directly harmed you or caused your condition to worsen.
How Delays in Medical Treatment Turn Manageable Conditions into Emergencies
The timing of medical care can mean the difference between a treatable condition and a life-altering emergency. But how do delays in medical treatment turn manageable conditions into emergencies?
Shortening the Window for Effective Treatment
Many medical conditions have a narrow intervention period during which a treatment can yield the best outcomes or stop further complications. When medical professionals intervene within this period, conditions that seem serious are still manageable using regular treatment procedures.
When they fail to do so, these conditions turn into medical emergencies that require rigorous and costly treatment procedures. For instance, a simple appendicitis is often treatable with antibiotics. If treatment is delayed, however, the appendix may rupture, and an emergency surgery may be necessary to prevent sepsis or abdominal lining infection.
Worsening of Manageable Chronic Conditions
Patients with chronic conditions can live fairly normal lives as long as they are consistently receiving the right treatment. Delaying treatment or check-ups can cause these conditions to worsen quickly. Late diagnosis or treatment of hypertension, for instance, can quickly escalate from a manageable blood pressure level to a heart attack.
Missed or Ignored Symptoms Become Medical Emergencies
Healthcare providers may miss, ignore, or misinterpret early symptoms of a serious condition, especially when they deviate from the acceptable standard of care. The outcome is that a condition that could have been otherwise managed by regular care ends up requiring urgent intervention.
Where Hospitals Lose Critical Time That Puts Patients at Risk
Hospital processes can drag in many areas. Some areas, however, pose more serious risks to patient safety. These areas include:
- Registration and Initial Assessment Desk: This section is the first point of interaction between a patient and the hospital. How fast a patient gets assessed and treated depends on how smooth the process is at the registration desk or triage. Delays at this point can cause a patient requiring urgent care to remain unattended in the waiting bay while his or her condition deteriorates. Triage delays often happen when staff get overwhelmed by the large number of patients, ignore or misinterpret critical symptoms, or fail to reevaluate symptoms after long waits.
- Laboratory and Diagnostic Rooms: Even after getting cleared at the triage, patients may wait longer than necessary to receive treatment due to delays in accessing the required tests. It’s impossible to make treatment decisions without diagnostic testing results. Delayed autism diagnosis, for instance, locks children out of essential early interventions. The outcome is serious mental health challenges. The waiting time for an autism diagnosis in Illinois ranges from 9 months to two years.
- Operating Rooms: Hospitals may waste critical time before performing necessary procedures, even after receiving diagnostic testing results. Delays in these high-stakes rooms happen due to poor surgical team coordination, operating room backlog, and staff shortfalls.
Why Healthcare Providers Downplay the Impact of Treatment Delays
Healthcare providers rarely acknowledge the true impact of treatment delays. Instead, they often try to make injuries arising from delays appear less serious, unavoidable, or unrelated to the actions or inactions of an individual provider. They downplay the impact of treatment delays for the following reasons:
Minimize Liability and Medical Malpractice Claims
Healthcare providers know that acknowledging that an injury occurred because of treatment delays often implies liability. Patients and their medical malpractice lawyers can use the acknowledgment, especially if it’s written, to prove causation in a malpractice claim. So, providers frame injuries stemming from delays as unavoidable to avoid or at least minimize liability.
Influencing Future Investigations
Medical records are key in all future investigations and regulatory reviews. Healthcare providers almost always frame these records in ways that predetermine future investigative focus. They might, for instance, claim that a condition was in an undetectable stage to avoid admitting to a misdiagnosis that can become malpractice.
Institutional Culture
Some hospitals have punitive cultures that discourage healthcare providers from reporting or fully documenting delays that cause preventable injuries. Individual providers may be held personally liable, subjected to disciplinary process, or even fired from their jobs for delays that could be more of a system issue than an individual issue.
Other healthcare institutions have internal guidelines that favor internal resolution over public accountability. Findings of internal investigations may be accessible to the management team only or discussed during internal meetings.
Don’t face the aftermath of an injury caused by delayed medical care alone. Contact Ankin Law and let our medical malpractice lawyer help you pursue justice and compensation that reflects the true scope of your damages.
FAQs
When does a delay in medical care become medical malpractice?
A delay in medical care becomes medical malpractice when it is unjustifiable, avoidable, or negligent and causes a preventable injury or even death to the patient. Four key elements must be established for the medical malpractice claim to be successful. They include the existence of a doctor-patient relationship, a delay that departs from the accepted standard of care, a direct link between the delay and the injury, and actual damages suffered by the patient.
How do treatment delays worsen otherwise treatable conditions?
Treatment delays worsen otherwise treatable conditions by shortening the window for effective treatment. For instance, most cancers are often curable when diagnosed and treated earlier. The treatment options are also minimally invasive. A delay in diagnosing and treating cancer allows the disease to advance to hard-to-treat levels and significantly reduce survival rates. Patients with chronic conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension, may suffer irreversible physical damage if they stay too long without treatment.
Can a medical malpractice lawyer prove my injury was caused by delayed care?
A medical malpractice lawyer can prove your injury stemmed from delayed care by conducting a thorough investigation, compiling strong evidence, and consulting a medical expert witness. The lawyer examines your medical records to determine where exactly unreasonable or negligent delays may have occurred. The lawyer then brings a similarly trained provider to explain when testing should have been done and treatment started. A delayed care becomes a medical malpractice if another provider with similar training would have acted sooner.
