dr-exmedic.com

There’s a persistent fear of litigation in every branch of healthcare (unless you’re an anesthesiologist–although the fear seems to run strongly there as well).  EMS is no exception, and we even have our own stories about what we’re most likely to be sued over–is it bad treatment, failure to transport sick patients, or some other problem?

It turns out that it may be some other problem–specifically, our driving, which accounted for better than a third of lawsuits in this study (which didn’t include crashes under $10,000).  Patient handling injuries (such as dropping a patient) were a statistical tie.  Clinical errors, it turns out, made up only 12% of the lawsuits.

And how common were lawsuits to begin with?  It’s tough to tell.  Although the study only analyzed 326 claims over 2 years, they had data on 2753 claims; some were open, and some were paid, but there are countless lawsuits that don’t actually result in any payment.  However, to give you some idea, those fewer than 3000 records were from the insurer McNeil and Company, which insures EMS services that collectively perform as many as 3.8 million trips a year.  In human numbers, that means that an EMS service might be sued successfully about every 2700 trips.