How Understaffing Leads to Fatal Incidents

Anyone who has waited for hours and hours in a crowded hospital emergency room knows the inconvenience of understaffing in one aspect of medical care, but what about understaffing throughout the medical facility? How does hospital and nursing home understaffing in Arizona and elsewhere impact patient care and lead to fatal incidents?

An Arizona medical malpractice attorney navigates claims for the families of patients who suffered fatal incidents due to understaffing in medical facilities.

Why Are There Healthcare Workforce Shortages?

According to healthcare professionals in Arizona, staffing shortages in the healthcare system have long shaped how hospitals and other facilities deliver patient care. While it’s common to blame shortages on a lack of young people choosing to become nurses and caregivers, data also reveal that retention is an even bigger problem than recruitment.

An estimated one in three nurses leaves the profession within the first three years of working in the healthcare system, citing burnout, lack of support, and inadequate mentorship.

Additional reasons for understaffing and high staff turnover rates are often financial. Hospitals and other facilities may try to protect their profits by hiring and retaining as few employees as possible. At the same time, the U.S. population is aging, with more people needing frequent care and long-term care.

What Are the Effects of Understaffing in Medical Facilities?

When hospitals and other facilities have an inadequate staff for the number of patients receiving care, it results in adverse effects, such as the following:

• Longer wait times for care
• Exhausted, overwhelmed nurses, caregivers, and staff
• Delayed diagnosis
• Increased use of emergency departments for non-emergency care
• Delayed emergency care

While a handful of states have laws requiring specific staff-to-patient ratios, Arizona has caregiver ratios only for nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

What Types of Fatal Incidents Occur Due to Understaffed Medical Facilities?

When patient numbers greatly exceed the medical providers and staff members in hospitals and other facilities, the results can be dangerous or even deadly incidents, such as the following:

• Medication mistakes
• Misdiagnosis
• Missed diagnosis
• Failure to treat
• Medical procedural errors
• Failure to order proper diagnostic tests
• Inadequate communication between facilities, or the failure to transfer or obtain complete patient records
• Insufficient patient monitoring or post-operative monitoring
• Increased hospital-borne infections
• Patient neglect and abuse
• Patient falls
• Workplace accidents among staff members

One scientific study on hospital understaffing states the following:

“Reports and research on the occurrences of adverse events show that a great number of patients experience adverse events while receiving health care all over the world…”

Breaching the Duty of Care In Fatal Incidents Caused by Understaffing

Medical providers and facilities have a legal obligation to uphold the expected standard of care. When a facility fails to provide adequate staffing, the result may be a preventable fatality caused by neglect, a medication error, a diagnostic mistake, or a hospital-borne infection—all examples of medical malpractice.

An injury victim or the surviving family member of a fatally injured patient may recover compensation through a medical malpractice case by providing evidence of the following:

• A medical provider/patient relationship existed at the time the malpractice occurred
• The provider owed a duty of care to treat the patient at the medical community’s accepted standard of care
• The breached this duty through malpractice
• The breach of duty caused injury, a worsened medical outcome, or wrongful death
• The injury victim or their surviving family suffered significant damages from the malpractice

Damages in fatal incidents caused by understaffing are available to a spouse, parent, or child of the decedent through a wrongful death claim to recover medical costs, burial expenses, and the lost earnings and benefits of a provider, as well as compensation for the family’s grief and anguish.

It takes a skilled medical malpractice attorney to document strong evidence that understaffing directly caused the fatal incident and make a compelling claim for wrongful death damages to a close surviving family member.