Medical Malpractice Research Paper

TO WHAT EXTENT DO EMERGENCY MEDICAL SREVICES LEAD TO MEDICAL MALPRACTICE?

The Emergency Medical Service, also known as EMS, is a system that provides emergency medical care. From an article by ems.gov, titled What Is EMS? it states that “Once activated by an incident that causes serious illness or injury, the focus of EMS is emergency medical care of the patient” (ems.gov). Although the main goal of the system is in favor of the patient’s overall health and wellbeing, there is a possibility that the work that has been done to a patient by the EMS workers is considered negligence, also known as medical malpractice. Medical malpractice cases are when the patient has not been given the proper treatment of care by the EMS workers and those cases have led to further injury or death. In

Negligence is the failure of providing the correct treatment given any circumstance. Negligence may be caused by factors such as, the ambulance driver may have gotten lost and had taken a wrong turn; therefore, delaying the arrival time, the 911 dispatcher gave the wrong information to the emergency medical technician (EMT), or the hospital was not prepared to assist the patient in time of their arrival. With these aspects in mind, it does raise the question if the EMS system does lead to medical malpractice.

Andrew Suszek, author of the article by All Law, titled Liability in Malpractice Lawsuits Involving EMTs and Paramedics, states that “some of the most critical treatment that a patient receives occurs in the minutes after an injury…that treatment can go a long way towards dictating- either positively or negatively- the patient’s outcome” (Suszek). The strength of this source is that it contains solid, straight forward information that is easy to comprehend and break down. However, a weakness of this article is that it does not include specific examples of real-world case that may help the