Help After A Serious Emergency Room Error

Last updated on May 12, 2026

There’s no question that the emergency room (ER) presents a frantic and challenging environment, but it is also one in which standards of care are extremely important. Doctors are required to adequately perform triage – the process of quick determination of patient priority. In this critical setting, one mistake can result in catastrophe. If someone is not properly diagnosed, it can seriously injure or even kill someone.

At Colley Shroyer Abraham we are injury lawyers who are committed to helping victims of ER errors seek justice. For more than 40 years, we have fought for people across Ohio. We know how to build strong cases and take them all the way to trial.

When Serious Conditions Get Overlooked In The ER Or ICU

ER physicians and staff have a professional obligation to conduct thorough examinations so that they can provide the right care and treatments. So, too, do providers in intensive care units (ICUs). ER and ICU malpractice often involves failure to promptly diagnose and treat life-threatening conditions such as:

• Heart attacks
• Bleeding issues
• Blood clots
• Brain injuries
• Fractures
• Strokes
• Aneurysms
• Pulmonary embolisms
• Bacterial meningitis
• Bowel ischemia

Overlooking these or other serious medical conditions can result in significant injuries, long-term disabilities or even death.

Common Emergency Room Errors In Columbus Hospitals

Emergency rooms throughout Columbus, including Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, Riverside Methodist Hospital, Mount Carmel East and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, treat high volumes of patients each day. While doctors and nurses often work in fast-paced, high-pressure environments, those conditions do not justify avoidable errors. Emergency room staff are still required to identify warning signs, order appropriate testing and provide care that meets the accepted standard.

Recognizing when a medical outcome is the result of negligence rather than an unavoidable complication can be difficult without experienced legal guidance. We focus on identifying the specific, most serious ER errors that involve delayed diagnosis and breakdowns during triage, including:

• Missed heart attacks and strokes: Patients may report chest pain, numbness, confusion, dizziness or shortness of breath, yet critical symptoms are dismissed as anxiety, indigestion or muscle strain. Delays of even a few hours can permanently change the outcome.
• Failure to identify sepsis or infection: Fever, elevated white blood cell counts, rapid heart rate and low blood pressure can point to sepsis. When providers fail to act quickly, the infection may spread throughout the body and become fatal.
• Medication and triage mistakes: Incorrect dosages, charting errors or delayed evaluations can happen when ER staff members move too quickly. Patients in obvious distress may wait too long for testing, imaging or physician review.

Our firm utilizes a deep network of medical professionals to review your records and pinpoint exactly where the standard of care was breached.

Imaging and discharge failures like these are also common sources of ER malpractice:

• Misread X-rays or CT scans: Fractures, internal bleeding, spinal infections and aneurysms may be visible on imaging studies but overlooked or improperly interpreted. Missing those findings can delay lifesaving treatment.
• Premature discharge: Some patients are sent home while still reporting severe pain, worsening symptoms or unstable vital signs. Others never receive follow-up instructions about abnormal lab results or pending test findings.
• EMTALA violations: Federal law requires emergency rooms to properly screen and stabilize patients, regardless of insurance status or financial condition. Turning patients away too early or failing to provide appropriate evaluation may violate those protections.

Our firm has spent decades investigating hospital negligence claims across Ohio, and we prepare every case as though it may go to trial. This approach has helped us recover substantial results for injured clients while keeping them informed throughout the process.

Our Multimillion-Dollar Results In ER Cases

Having worked on medical malpractice cases for decades, we are prepared to do everything to build the strongest possible case to maximize your compensation. By partnering directly with clients and utilizing our network of medical professionals, we have obtained tens of millions of dollars in our pursuit of justice. We are prepared to bring our approach to your case.

Here are some examples of the financial recoveries that we have obtained in ER malpractice cases:

• $2 million: A pregnant woman with twins arrived in the ER with possible premature labor. She was 23 weeks pregnant. The physician did a vaginal exam and noted her cervix to be dilated at 2 cm. Because he did not check the chart, he did not know that two days prior, her cervix was closed. She was sent home. She continued to call in, but the nurses did not tell her to come in. Three days later she came to the hospital dilated to 8 cm and in labor. The physicians initially stopped the labor with drugs, but the large dilation exposed the fetal sac, and an infection occurred, causing new contractions. The babies were born at 23 weeks and six days and both survived. Both children have learning disabilities. The defense maintained that nothing could prevent premature contractions and that nothing the physician could have done would have altered the course of events.
• $2.1 million: A middle-aged man went to the ER complaining of neck pain. The ER doctors discharged him without the benefit of a cervical spine X-ray. The next morning, he awoke permanently paralyzed due to a spinal abscess.
• $250,000: A 35-year-old man arrived in the ER with signs and symptoms of a heart attack. He was worked up, and a heart attack was ruled out, but he still had pain in his chest. He was sent home, and the pain worsened. He went to a different hospital ER 12 hours later with a new symptom that included shortness of breath. A CT exam revealed a dissecting aortic aneurysm. He died during emergency surgery to repair the aneurysm. The defense argued that the only way to have made the diagnosis was to do a CT exam on the first ER visit, and that is not the standard of care, as it is not practical to give everyone with chest pain a CT exam. Our expert believed that D-dimer blood work would have shown the formation of a clot that would have resulted in a CT exam.

Read more about our many success stories.

Get The Legal Help You Deserve For ER Or ICU Malpractice

Talk to us, ER error attorneys in Columbus, about your situation. Call 614-678-5072 for a free initial consultation. You can also reach us online.