Accidents and emergencies

Emergency medicine is now a well-established field of medicine in its own right.  It involves skills of prevention, diagnosis and management of acute and urgent aspects of illness and injury affecting patients of all age groups with a full spread of physical and behavioural disorders.  Specialist brain and spinal injury claims solicitors at Leigh Day have successfully secured compensation for a number of clients whose life-threatening injuries have been misdiagnosed, or incorrectly treated A+E.

The A+E department is often the first point of contact a patient will have with the NHS during a period of illness or after an injury.  For this reason, each contact represents an opportunity to change the course of either an acute or chronic disease process or to treat trauma so as to avoid long-term effects.  The increasing sophistication of medicine means that, with proper treatment, we can expect excellent outcomes.  In medico-legal terms, a failure at this level can have far reaching consequences.

Our experience of A+E cases is wide and varied.  Recent “failure to diagnose” cases involve:

• TB infection of the spine
• A case of very high blood sodium levels
• Meningococcal septicaemia
• Aortic aneurysm.

Sadly, correct treatment in each of these cases would have avoided serious injury or death.

News