Nurse jailed for nursing!!!Errors in medicine and their consequences.

The Risks involved in Nursing

Nurses are the foundation of any health system. Without nurses, hospitals, surgeries and clinics cannot run. The covid pandemic has seen nurses portrayed first as angels and martyrs in the frontline fight against covid, then expendable assets for health departments and ungrateful populations and then as villains for demanding better pay, staffing and conditionsjhvjhg

Nurses need to be as acutely aware of medicolegal risks as doctors should be. The practice of nursing is often more treacherous than that faced by medical doctors, including those in high-risk professions. Nurses have a high risk of violence experienced at work, are often understaffed and can often be the scapegoats when medication errors or other adverse patient outcomes occur. Doctors and nurses cumulatively as a profession, are prone to burn-out, bullying, abuse, becoming victims of physical violence at work, addiction, suicide, work stress, work injuries, psychological damage, psychological trauma and serious legal issues as a consequence of their work.

“The nurse as a professional; Registered nurses are professionals in their own right and always have carried individual responsibility for the consequences of the care they provide. The Code of Ethics for Nurses in Australia, produced by the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council, states as follows:

?"As morally autonomous professionals, nurses are accountable for their clinical decision making and legal obligations for the provision of safe and competent nursing care."”[1]

“Although traditionally the majority of claims of negligence have been directed against medical practitioners and/or hospitals, nurses are exposed to medico-legal risk. Nurses played the most prominent role in the events that gave rise to 361 of a total of 6,453 reported medico-legal incidents in Australian public hospitals in 2004-05 - approximately 6% of total incidents.5 They are, however, rarely named as defendants in litigation. It is usually a nurse's employer hospital or health service which is named as the defendant in an action in negligence.?Other potential consequences of adverse events Apart from an action in negligence, there are several other avenues through which the management of a patient by a nurse may be scrutinised. The main ones are:

x complaints to the hospital or health service;

x complaints to the Health Services Commissioner;

x a Coroner's investigation; and

x an investigation by a health care professional regulatory body.”[2]

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With the recent RaDonda Vaught case, I must add to the list from the Rural Collaborative Practice Project-

X Criminal charge and sanction

X Civil action for damages

Doctors, namely, Obstetricians, Emergency Medicine Physicians and Surgeons are at the top of the litigation risk in Australia with more than 40% of medicolegal cases being directed at them as a group. Nurses work at every level with these doctors and are often completely in control of the management of a patient as per the instructions of a treating doctor. A nursing error can exonerate a doctor from liability. When millions of dollars are involved in complex trials with multiple defendants looking for apportionment of damage, every piece of clinical information will be analysed and scrutinized for error. Nursing notes are very often the clinical evidence upon which a case or investigation will turn. In most cases nurses work as employees, but often nurses may be working as hired labour or bank nurses. They are usually covered under employees vicarious liability, or may have private indemnity insurance. It is important to establish from your employment contract and employer under what insurance your clinical work is covered, or if you work in multiple places or as a contractor, that you have appropriate and adequate medical indemnity insurance.

The RaDonda Vaught Case is a tragic case that recently reached conclusion after 5 years in the USA. The case involves an ICU nurse who has been jailed for 12 years as a consequence of a medication error that led to the death of a patient.

The following are excerpts of an article on the case.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A Davidson County jury has found RaDonda Vaught, a former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse, guilty in the 2017 death of Charlene Murphey.

Vaught was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult. She was facing a charge of reckless homicide, but the jury found her guilty of a lesser charge. [3]

“It sits on a knife edge of precedent on handling medical errors like this one in criminal court, not civil courts or before licensing boards where they are more commonly heard.?

Everyone agrees there was no intent to harm Murphey in this case, raising questions about why Vaught was charged with homicide.?

"The nursing community is really angry and frustrated," Vaught said. "Nurses have found their voice and they're...pissed about this, as they should be.”

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Witnesses for both the state and the defense said Vaught was a talented, caring, compassionate nurse who was trusted with leadership roles even though she was still new to the field.?

She was stripped of her nursing license in July and it's unclear whether she will ever be able to return to her former profession, whatever the jury decides.?

Getting to know the families of her patients used to be her favorite part.?

"You don't do this job and not be worried.?You may leave that hospital, but you take those patients home with you every day. You take their families home with you every day," she said.?"I did not have that opportunity with Miss Murphey or her family then, but I will say now they have been incredibly kind."

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"(They" berated around the courtroom yesterday in a spectacular show of lies and deceit. That is the difference between the career field that I worked in, and the career field that they worked in. And I hope that people in the public see that," she said.?

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Radonda Vaught Criminally Negligent Homicide Sentence & Verdict

The 38-year-old nurse is serving time in prison for failing to care a patient properly. Her medical licence was revoked by the court, and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Furthermore, she will never be able to obtain work as a nurse, and all of her educational credentials will be revoked.

Today, the 5-year-old case was proven, and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison.[4]

[1] DLA PHILLIPS FOX Medico-legal issues Rural Collaborative Practice Project; Page 5

[2] DLA PHILLIPS FOX Medico-legal issues Rural Collaborative Practice Project; Page 4-5

[3] https://www.newschannel5.com/news/jury-to-soon-deliver-verdict-in-trial-for-radonda-vaught-former-vanderbilt-medical-center-nurse

[4] https://theancestory.com/radonda-vaught-husband-family-criminally-negligent-homicide-sentence-verdict/