Purple group – (DT)
Question
Read the required articles on health care workers’ legal liability for medical mistakes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2155825615303653;
AND
Analyze current events in legal liability for medical mistakes, either in nursing or another healthcare profession.
OPTIONAL:
Compare an example of legal liability with the IOM recommendations (optional)
NSE TO DD
Medical mistakes by health care professionals is increasingly growing as the years go by. It tends to be more scary for nurses because they provide most of the care and administer the medications. Most of the medical mistakes stem from medication errors. Medications can be lethal if the dosage is too much, for the wrong purpose, interacts badly with another medication, etc. The case of RaDonda Vaught was highly mainstream, and her case seemed to put fear in the hearts of medical professionals ( especially nurses). According to NPR, “RaDonda Vaught a former nurse criminally prosecuted for a fatal drug error in 2017, was convicted of gross neglect of an impaired adult and negligent homicide…Vaught was tasked to retrieve Versed from a computerized medication cabinet but instead grabbed a powerful paralyzer, vecuronium. According to an investigation report filed in her court case, the nurse overlooked several warning signs as she withdrew the wrong drug — including that Versed is a liquid but vecuronium is a powder — and then injected Murphey and left her to be scanned. By the time the error was discovered, Murphey was brain-dead” (Kelman, 2022). That situation was very unfortunate, but she did avoid the warning signs, which seems to be common. Many professionals fail to double check their work or consider patient safety before perfoming task maybe because some tasks are recurrent and habitual. Because of this, they might try to skip over essential protocols. Also, according to the Patient Safety Network, there was a case where the wrong dosage of a drug was administered to a little 2-year-old girl. “He discovered the patient had received oxycodone 3 times in less than 8 hours (1 dose prior to the dressing change and 2 doses after). The nurse checked the automated dispensing machine in which the oxycodone was stored and was surprised to find a higher concentration of oxycodone solution stored in place of the typical, lower concentration pediatric solution…higher concentration of oxycodone solution was incorrectly placed in the automated dispensing machine by a pharmacist who was working per diem. The RCA also found that the nurse did not check the concentration of the medication to be administered against the order written by the physician” (Jelincic et. al, 2018). In this case, there was another medication error, which almost cost the life of the patient. The difficulty surronds medications. Even the article titled, “Medication Errors and Criminal Negligence Lessons from Two Cases” all the issues stemmed from people being negligent and performing risky behaviors with medications. According to John Hopkins medicine, “Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient