When an overloaded ED gets it wrong, who should be accountable?

Chalongrat Chuvaree/Getty Images At this time of year, crowded hospital emergency departments are a familiar sight around New Zealand. It’s also a symptom of a health system under intense pressure. For patients, it means long waiting times to see a doctor. But for clinicians balancing workforce shortages with rising demand, it can mean making increasingly difficult decisions in far from ideal circumstances. Such pressures, which can raise the risk of clinical error, have prompted the New…