find a recent medical error that made the news.  What happened in the incident?

find a recent medical error that made the news.

1. What happened in the incident?
2. Who was involved?
3. What were the ramifications for the patient and/or staff?
4. Reflect on the incident and think about some causes and possible interventions that could have prevented the error.

then reply to Pat

1. What happened in the incident that I am speaking about truly made large waves through the nursing community. The nursing community as a whole has been challenged, sharpened, and even divided. My topic is about nurse RaDonda Vaught. This nurse worked in Tennessee at one of the most well known and trusted nursing institutions, Vanderbilt University hospital. This is where a medical error on the part of a nurse cost the life of a patient. The wrong medication was given and it had deadly consequences.

2. Who all was involved? in this specific situation, there are only a few people directly involved with the medical errors but there are now many individuals involved in the case overall. The overall involvement of different entities has just exploded in this case. The board of nursing has held official hearings in regard to what happened on that fateful day. The families of both of the involved individuals have been affected greatly by the actions on that day.

3. The ramifications have been numerous for those involved. The nurse has been criminally prosecuted and went before a court hearing. This is explained further, “in Nashville on criminal charges of reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult for the killing of Charlene Murphey, the 75-year-old patient who died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in late December 2017. If convicted of reckless homicide, Vaught faces up to 12 years in prison (Kelman, 2022)”. There has also been a number of things that have come up in the charge. “The DA’s office points to this override as central to Vaught’s reckless homicide charge. Vaught acknowledges she performed an override on the cabinet. But she and others say overrides are a normal operating procedure used daily at hospitals (Kelman. 2022)”.  There has been much backlash on the hospital for allowing such an override to happen. This was a normal process that the hospital allowed to happen. This has caused outrage and adjustments to the system.

4. When thinking about the best way to look at this, I think there are many different ways. First, I do not believe that there is any doubt that the nurse is in the wrong for not being more diligent as a nurse. There are practices that you learn all the way in nursing school that could have helped her avoid this tragic action. If there were more checks concerning the pulling of paralytic agents, there would have been a chance for someone else to catch the error. This would have been good, because the nurse obviously wasn’t in the frame of mind to make logical decisions even if there were other steps she had take.

Patrick,

Sources

Kelman, B. (2022, March 22). As a nurse faces prison for a deadly error, her colleagues worry: Could I be next? NPR. Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/22/1087903348/as-a-nurse-faces-prison-for-a-deadly-error-her-colleagues-worry-could-i-be-next

find a recent medical error that made the news.  What happened in the incident?

Introduction

Medical errors are rare, but they can be devastating. In the United States alone, there are over 230,000 deaths that can be attributed to medical malpractice each year. These mistakes often occur because doctors and nurses don’t have enough training or experience in their field. They also may not know what they’re doing when they go into a patient’s room (such as with an emergency situation). If you’re considering going to see a doctor for yourself or someone else in your family, here are some things you should know about potential medical errors:

Find recent incidents of medical errors and learn how they can be prevented.

Medical errors are rare, but they can be prevented. Medical errors are caused by a variety of factors, including human error and medical equipment failure. In many cases, these errors are preventable if you follow standard procedures and protocols.

You may have heard of some of the most recent medical errors made headlines:

• A doctor prescribed one dose of pain medication for an injured patient who had been prescribed another dose by his doctor; this led to an overdose death later that day or even before he left the hospital (1).
• A radiologist failed to detect cervical cancer in a woman who died from it because she was misdiagnosed as having ovarian cancer (2).

Get the facts about potential problems, such as medication mix-ups, surgical flaws, and bedside mistakes.

When it comes to medical errors, one of the most common is medication mix-ups. These can occur because of human error or equipment malfunction, or both. For example, a nurse may not have recorded all the medications given to an elderly patient on his/her chart properly and therefore forget to check each patient’s blood glucose levels upon discharge. Another example of this type of mistake was an emergency room doctor who accidentally gave a patient an antibiotic that made him/her sick instead!

In addition to these common types of errors, there are others that may not be as well known but still cause harm: surgical flaws such as leaving stitches inside someone’s body after surgery; bedside mistakes like giving someone too much medication at once (or not enough); other examples include leaving bandages on wounds too long before they’ve healed completely…you get the idea!

Learn how to spot an error before it happens by reading patient charts.

If you’re a nurse, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about an error? Chances are, it was something like “We ran out of morphine.”

If you’re a patient, what does it feel like when your chart notes show up in the news as an example of questionable care and treatment?

It’s important for both sides of the equation—the patient and their loved ones—to know how best to spot errors before they happen. And by knowing how to spot errors before they happen, we can prevent adverse events from happening in the first place!

Bring up a medical error in a doctor’s office or hospital.

• Ask the doctor if there was a mistake.
• Ask if the mistake was caught and fixed.
• If so, ask for an example of how this happened in your case and what you could do to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
• Also ask about ways to improve safety, communication and documentation in general, as well as what specific steps have already been taken by your hospital or clinic since this incident occurred (if any).

Medical errors are rare, but they can be prevented.

Medical errors are surprisingly common, but they can be prevented.

Most medical errors are preventable and often result from failing to follow established standards of care. For example, it has been estimated that up to 250 patients die each year in U.S. hospitals due to medication errors with almost half of those deaths occurring while they were being treated at an intensive care unit (ICU). In addition to causing needless suffering for patients who may have survived otherwise unnecessary procedures or treatments, these types of mistakes also cost insurance companies millions of dollars annually due to lawsuits filed by families whose loved ones died because someone wasn’t paying attention during surgery or misdiagnosed a condition during another procedure

Conclusion

All in all, medical errors are rare. But they can be prevented. When you read up on them and know what to look out for, you’ll be able to help prevent them from happening to someone else.