Ambulance Chaser
An ambulance chaser is often a derogatory term used for a Lawyer who is the first person who manages to speak to you after an accident. These can be fee based lawyers and no win no fee based lawyers, are they litterally make their living by finding compensation for people who have been injured through the direct or sometimes indirect negligence or incompetence of another person or organisation.
However, sometime a person should be looking at gaining some sort of compensation for an injury that they have sustained as a result of someone elses gross incompetence or negligence. Furthermore, sometimes an Ambulance Service, Health Service or Doctor is either too lazy or are trying to save money by not ordering the required tests and procedures. It is for these people, who Ambulance Chasers/Lawyers live for and actually provide the community a service by ensuring that it is finacially not worth these people’s while to take negligent “short cuts” with people’s medical interventions.
As a paramedic, I know a case where a patient was taken to hospital with a badly injured knee after dislocating it playing with her brother. When she arrived at the hospital (by Ambulance) she had been given a large amount of analgesia (pain relief), but it had not affected the severe agony that she was in. Her knee looked okay from the outside, but there was definitely something wrong (otherwise she wouldn’t be in agony). All her vital signs corresponded with someone in severe pain – her pulse was fast, her blood preasure was high. The doctor looked at her and decided she was okay and sent her home. I talked to the doctor (as the paramdic treating her) and asked why he didn’t order X-rays, because she was obviously in pain and something was causing that. To this, the doctor replied that it would cost his emergency department $400 to call out the on-call radiologist and that the patient was probably going to be okay.
She wasn’t okay, in the end, her patella was lodged into her poplateal nerve and over the course of the next 24 hours (before the patient could get to another hospital) she had lost the ability to use her right leg. Because of this doctor trying to save $400 a 16 year old girl now has a severe limp for the rest of her life.
If this patient sued the Doctor and Hospital, she would ensure that both the Doctor and the Hospital never tried to take such reckless short-cuts with a person’s health again.