Did you hear? er nurse in court for failure to report!

[mo trauma rn]

Have you heard the news?? An Er nurse in sw missouri is being charged with failure to report child abuse.to make it short the nurse did asses the child and asked the right questions and decided that it was not abuse.the child was admitted for 3 days and cared for by 35+ other workers including dfs staff that also stated no abuse was seen and returned the child back to the foster home.Four days later the child returned and died of shaken baby synd.This is a landmark case and one to keep an eye on.If convicted the way we make our nursing decisions may all change...currently we are seeing an increase in parents fears about bringing their kids to the er thus the pot. for child death is rising in our area.Also the pandamoniam in the nursing staffs in the area ,afraid NOT to hotline everything.Again flooding the dfs system and increasing the pot. of true victims deaths while waiting to be found in the broken dfs system.We support this nurse and show up in scrubbs to every hearing so far.Her trial is June 24.Help us support her and let the area know that we work to save lives not to turn our heads away from any abused victim....

[sanakruz, ADN]

I agree It's not her fault- The ER nurse is NOT expected to police foster home placements!

That said- We all are mandated reporters of suspected abuse- Just suspicion- Not our place to investigate or any thing else. Here in CA the form we fill out is a SCAR -

suspected child abuse report.

I fill out about 2 a month.. And I'm a psych nurse! problem here- Sounds like the system IS broken down- Again it's not the nursing staffs place to decide if it is abuse- That's for social services and the DA's office.

[mo trauma rn]

I agree that it is not our place to police each case but dfs job.In this case they did see the child and returned the child to the foster home.I am not sure why the case is against one nurse who had the child for approx. 1 hr.

[valk]

Mo trauma,

Do you know why she alone out of 35 staffers who treated this child is being singled out for prosecution?

It's good that she has the support of her fellow nurses.

[mo trauma rn]

from what I understand, she gave a statment to the police thinking she was helping the case against the foster dad who is in jail for the crime.something in the statement cased the case.I can tell you that the health dept has reviewed the hosp and found no problems with the handeling of the pt, the hosp itself reviewed the chart and found no problems.she was not even told she was being charged with anything untill she saw it on the news in a pts room!!! something stinks in this case!