Overworked doctors are twice as likely to make medical mistakes that injure or kill their patients. With the rising demand for their services, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are often required to work long hours, juggle multiple tasks at a time, and see many different patients. Doctors who are overwhelmed by their workload are likely to take shortcuts or miss important details, which could lead to medical errors and negligence.

Long Hours and Burnout Create Dangerous Situations

Over-scheduling, near impossible workloads, and medical staff shortages can easily lead to doctor burnout and disastrous errors. For instance, errors are bound to occur when doctors are expected to work for more than 20 hours or when surgeons are expected to perform delicate procedures after excessively long shifts.

Burnout doctors are twice as likely to make diagnostic errors, use poor judgment, and make technical mistakes during medical procedures. Injuries and death can occur as a result of hospital-acquired infections, delayed treatment, improper anesthetic administration, missed or delayed diagnosis, medication overdose or underdose, surgical mistakes, inadequate monitoring after a procedure, failure to take proper precautions, and failure to act on tests results. The highest percentage of errors caused by physician burnout occurs among surgeons, radiologists, emergency room doctors, family doctors, neurologists, and urologists.

While our practice concentrates on plaintiff’s personal injury claims, we will take selective construction litigation referrals. Chuck Adler has extensive experience in litigating construction claims. Claims have included: United Center, Rush Medical Center, numerous office buildings, shopping centers, and industrial centers including the former W.F. Hall printing plant, a 1,000,000 square-foot property where the Playboy Magazine was published.