The most common hospital errors that lead to patient injuries in Harrisburg include missed or delayed diagnoses, medication errors, failure to monitor patients, hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), premature discharge, and communication breakdowns between departments.
In Pennsylvania, you can pursue a claim when a hospital error causes you a preventable injury. However, the success of your claim will depend on identifying exactly what went wrong and proving it with evidence. That’s why it’s in your best interest to work with a hospital error attorney in Harrisburg. At Marzella & Associates, our legal team can trace the failure back to its source before the record gets rewritten and develop a strong compensation case.
Delayed or Missed Diagnoses in Pennsylvania Hospitals
Data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) states that diagnostic errors, including delays in identifying strokes, infections, internal bleeding, and cardiac events, are a leading patient-safety problem nationwide.
These cases usually involve emergency departments where symptoms are documented but not escalated. These can include lab results flagged but not reviewed, or a patient discharged while still deteriorating. A lawyer can reconstruct the timeline using time stamps, nursing notes, and test orders to show when intervention should’ve happened.
Medication Errors During Hospital Stays
Wrong dosages, duplicate administration, or contraindicated drugs can cause organ damage, cardiac events, or prolonged hospitalization. These errors rarely appear as a single obvious mistake. They appear with overlapping medication times, missing verification steps, or pharmacy overrides. In this case, a Harrisburg hospital error attorney can analyze medication administration records, pharmacy logs, and internal verification policies to determine what happened.
Failure to Monitor Patients for Deteriorating Conditions
Hospitals are required to monitor patients with unstable conditions. Failure to do so can allow respiratory distress, sepsis, or internal bleeding to progress unchecked. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sepsis alone contributes to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations each year, and delayed recognition significantly increases mortality risk.
In Harrisburg, at facilities such as Penn State Health, Holy Spirit, and UPMC Harrisburg, monitoring failures frequently involve ignored vital-sign trends or alarms that repeatedly sound without escalation. A lawyer can compare vital signs data, alarm logs, and staffing records to show when monitoring failed and why. These cases frequently expose systemwide breakdowns rather than one isolated error.
Hospital-Acquired Infections Linked to Poor Protocols
Hospital-acquired infections aren’t always unavoidable. The CDC reports that many diseases stem from failures in sterile technique, catheter management, or post-surgical care. In negligence cases, the issue is not whether an infection occurred, but whether infection control protocols were followed. Early discharge, ignored symptoms, or missed lab results are usually involved.
A Harrisburg hospital error lawyer can review infection control policies, lab trends, and discharge decisions together. When a hospital deviates from its own prevention standards, the deviation is legally material.
Premature Discharge Decisions That Put Patients at Risk
Pressure to free beds can lead to patients being discharged too soon. Warning signs documented in the chart, such as fever, abnormal labs, or uncontrolled pain, are sometimes minimized to justify discharge decisions. These cases typically surface days later when the patient returns in critical condition. By then, the hospital may characterize the outcome as an unavoidable complication.
An attorney can align discharge notes with nursing records and vital signs to show whether the discharge decision matched the patient’s condition at the time, not how it was later described.
Communication Breakdowns Between Hospital Departments
AHRQ research consistently identifies handoff failures as a major contributor to patient injury. Orders that never reach the bedside, consults that are requested but not completed, or abnormal results that are not passed along all fall into this category. A hospital error lawyer in Harrisburg can trace responsibility across departments to show where communication broke down. Hospitals function as systems, and when the system fails, accountability shouldn’t disappear.
How Hospital Error Claims Establish Accountability
Learn how our Harrisburg hospital error attorneys can serve you by contacting Marzella & Associates at 717-876-8681 or online and scheduling your no-cost case assessment.