How Your Trip to the Emergency Room Can Effect Your Personal Injury Case

If you were in any kind of accident, if it was serious enough, you will find yourself on the way to the emergency room. The doctors and nurses that work there provide a valuable service to anyone with injuries, be it minor or severely life-threatening. They not only provide care but injury assessment as well. However, like your behavior at the accident scene, what happens in the emergency room is important to your personal injury case as well.

Assessing Your Injuries
When you are in the emergency room after an accident, this is not the time to have a stiff upper lip and put on a strong facade. The nurses and doctors will be assessing your injuries so they can get you treatment and prioritize the worst patients in triage. This documentation of injuries can be essential to your case. If you didn’t want to mention your back pain, but ended up needing treatment after a trip to the emergency room, it could be argued that your back was not injured in the accident itself. You could have hurt it hours later lifting a box for all anyone else knows.

When taken to the emergency room, always be honest with every single pain or anything that does not feel right. This is how medical professionals treat you and it is how you can get compensation for those injuries caused in the accident.

Sign Carefully
Once you have been stabilized in the emergency room, you will likely be barraged with a large amount of paperwork. If possible, you want someone who was not in the trauma of an accident to read it before you sign it. Most importantly, you want to make sure health insurance covers the visit if applicable. You also want to make sure that anyone who isn’t a doctor doesn’t slip you any extra paperwork such as a liability waiver. Always read any document before signing it or you will almost assuredly regret it later.

Keep The Accident Descriptions Short
It is likely that at some point, a doctor or nurse will ask you what happened. You want to keep the answer as short as possible. When you are asked this question, the nurse or doctor is only trying to get an idea of what they should check. If you were rear-ended, this is an indicator they may want to check for a concussion, whiplash, or other brain and spine injuries. Sometimes this pain doesn’t manifest right away, so they want to catch it before it becomes a problem.

The issue with your explanation of the accident is that the nurse or doctor may have to tell it to someone else if they ask. Doctors and nurses are busy people, so if you gave a long and detailed explanation to them, they are likely to paraphrase it or get crucial details wrong. While you want to give medical staff full details on pain and other ailments, you want to keep how you got them as short and simple as possible. This statement may even make it into your medical records. Once it is there, it is the statement that your case will have to stick with.

Need Help?
Unfortunately, if you are in an accident, you probably will make some mistakes in the emergency room. People never expect to get in an accident, so they don’t know they need to prepare for how to act when they do get into one. However, even if you made some mistakes at the scene or in the ER, we can help you. Contact us today to see how the Law Firm of Freeman & Freeman can help you get the compensation that you need for your personal injury accident, even if you didn’t do your claim any favors.