Accident & Emergency Claims

Accident and emergency departments provide a vital and often life-saving service. On the rare occasions that you might need to visit A&E, you have the right to expect that hospital staff will be able to diagnose and treat a serious health condition as soon as possible.

A&E departments are busy, and doctors and nurses are under pressure to keep waiting times down and move patients on or out as quickly as possible. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t expect a good standard of care.

Our medical negligence solicitors have years of experience helping people claim compensation who’ve suffered because of:

Misdiagnosis
Delayed treatment
Failure to refer the patient for appropriate tests
Insufficient examination of the patient

Most of our A&E negligence cases are funded using a No Win No Fee agreement, which means you’re not at any financial risk when you make a claim with us.*

We strongly believe in the importance of rehabilitation and we’ll help you access care and support throughout your claim and after it has settled.

For a free initial consultation about making an accident and emergency claim, call us today on 0800 121 6567 or contact us online and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

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Accident & Emergency Claims - More Information

They were always there to answer my questions and queries when I was at my most vulnerable and they persevered to obtain the best possible result."

Lisa, client

Frequently Asked Questions

How Are Conditions Misdiagnosed In A&E?

Doctors and nurses in A&E are under a great deal of pressure, but they still need to meet certain standards. They’re specially trained to be able to recognise and diagnose illnesses, prioritising patients so that the most serious cases receive urgent treatment. When this process breaks down and people slip through the net…

… the results can be tragic and sometimes fatal.

Some of the most common mistakes involve failures to:

Take a patient’s medical history properly
Refer a patient for tests (e.g. x-rays, blood tests and scans)
Examine a patient properly

These errors can mean that patients are sent home from A&E when they should have been admitted to hospital. People with general (diffuse) pain rather than localised symptoms are sometimes simply given painkillers when in fact they’re suffering from a serious health problem.

By the time a doctor or consultant has diagnosed the medical condition – often after the patient’s made multiple visits to a GP or walk-in centre – it might be too late to give them the treatment they should have received when they first visited A&E.

We could help if you’ve had one of these conditions misdiagnosed in A&E:

Aneurysms
Broken bones
Cauda equina
Heart attacks
Meningitis
Misdiagnosed miscarriage
Severe allergic reactions (anaphylactic shock)
Strokes

Our medical negligence solicitors understand the impact that misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis in A&E can have. We’ll investigate exactly which processes broke down when your condition went unnoticed, seeking answers from the organisation responsible.

What Constitutes Negligent Treatment In A&E?

When you arrive at A&E after a traumatic accident, you should receive a reasonable standard of treatment.

But under the time pressures of an A&E department, mistakes and oversights can happen. For example, a fracture might be treated negligently if:

The pieces of bone aren’t aligned properly
Needless surgery takes place when a plaster cast would have worked
It leads to unnecessary scarring

It’s important that wounds are treated correctly too – negligent cleaning or dressing could result in infection and further complications, while negligent stitching could cause excessive scarring.

If you’ve received sub-standard medical care in A&E, we can help you claim compensation. We’ll investigate your case, working out exactly how the malpractice happened and what could have been done to prevent it.

What’s The NHS Complaints Process?

For many of our clients, an apology and an explanation is as important as compensation. We can guide you not only through your claim but also through the NHS complaints process.

There are a number of schemes to deal with complaints about GPs or hospitals. It’s often possible…

to claim a small amount of compensation from these schemes, and the organisation involved will also sometimes make an official apology.

If you’re not happy with the response to your complaint, we can help with the next steps. That could mean requesting an independent inquiry or taking your complaint to the Health Service Ombudsman.

For very serious complaints, we can take your case to the General Medical Council (GMC). The GMC disciplines doctors and has the ability to prevent them from working in future. While the GMC cannot award compensation, many of our clients take comfort from seeing steps taken to ensure that the mistakes made in their case cannot be repeated.

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