WhiteCoat’s Call Room is a blog I’ve been reading to remind me from time to time of the chaos I avoided by not going in to medical practice. The times when I’m tempted to think that maybe I should have stayed in are tempered by this ER doc’s posts.
Looks like from “The Trial of a WhiteCoat, pt 1” entry that he’s gearing up for or has just gone through a malpractice trial. Reading through the entry literally made my stomach do flops. This type of patient outcome could have happened to any ER physician, and most likely, it HAS happened to each physician during their training. As much as we’d like the system to be perfect, errors like this occur, which is completely unfortunate for the families involved.
Unfortunately, these outcomes do happen in the ER and hospitals. Given the volume of patient visits – 120 million ER visits in the US for 2006 - and time allow to see patients, etc, it’s amazing that these types of outcomes don’t happen more often. The statistics from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 2006 Emergency Department Summary are astounding – I haven’t sifted through all the methodologies or stats, but check out the highlights on p2.
Overall, the story above is an emotional toss up for me (and, admittedly, without knowing both sides or the full story) – I can sympathize with the doc, but I can also sympathize with the family who lost their father/grandfather. I will keep posting these articles/entries as they come up on the WhiteCoat’s Call Room.
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