To get the answer to the question of what an experienced personal injury attorney will tell you to do to avoid having a medical mistake occur to you in a North Carolina (NC) hospital on a holiday weekend, please read the item put up by my fellow medical malpractice lawyer, John C., on our Northeast North Carolina InjuryBoard website. Hint: Stay away from the hospital this July 4!
If you were a top orthopedic doctor working at the Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, North Carolina, would you spend your July 4 with your family eating corn and hot dogs or would you work an extra shift in the medical facility? Do you think the experienced nurse who has tons of seniority in the emergency room is going to schedule herself to be working on Thanksgiving if she doesn’t have to rather than getting the turkey dinner together for her family? Obviously, the medical personnel at the hospital are just like you and me and so the answer is clearly no. If you have any choice in the matter, you’ll want to get your health care at the hospital during a time when the best and most experienced doctor, nurse and technician are on duty, not off. It always amazes me how often when we receive calls from families whose loved ones were hurt as a result of negligence in a hospital setting that the date of the event coincided with July 4 or some other big holiday. The risk of human errors, involved in failing to properly diagnose a stroke or serious heart condition is more likely to occur when there is some understaffing or distraction problem like those that can be caused on big family holiday weekends.