In Martin, ER patients don’t always arrive with a neatly packaged diagnosis. Symptoms can be intermittent, history may be incomplete, and families may be trying to explain what happened after a long day at work or travel. That’s exactly why emergency care has to be responsive to what the patient says and what the staff observes right then—vital signs, pain reports, neurologic symptoms, breathing issues, and abnormal test results.
When timing goes wrong—such as:
- a triage decision that doesn’t match the risk level of reported symptoms,
- delays in ordering or acting on imaging/labs,
- discharge instructions that don’t align with what the ER team knew,
- medication choices that don’t reflect allergies, interactions, or dosing requirements,
—the harm can compound quickly. And once time passes, it becomes harder to reconstruct what was known at the moment decisions were made.


