Nurse Charged With Homicide

[Nurse Beth]

Radonda Vaught, a 35 year old nurse who worked at the University of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has been indicted on charges of reckless homicide. Read Nurse Gives Lethal Dose of Vecuronium

Radonda is the nurse who mistakenly gave Vecuronium (a paralytic) to a patient instead of Versed. The patient died.

[Wuzzie]

3 minutes ago, indienurse said:

I have a solution. If I were a nurse at Vanderbilt, I would quit my job. If every nurse quits their job at Vanderbilt, that wouldn't be good for V. But one can only dream.

If you read the current news they aren't the only medical corporation guilty of a major cover-up but that's fodder for a new thread.

[Horseshoe, BSN, RN]

Okay, I'm amazed to learn that someone with 2 years of ICU experience wasn't familiar with Versed, both in brand name and generic, its forms, its effects (and thus the need for monitoring), etc. She also should have been familiar with vec and that danger label should have meant something to her.

But again, by that point, she wasn't even looking at the box or the bottle, the label, etc. She was busy talking to an orientee about an entirely different issue and was just going through the physical motions of drawing up a substance, reconstituting it, and injecting it. Completely absent, as though she were a robot and her mind was in another place entirely.

Horrible.

[Wuzzie]

10 minutes ago, Horseshoe said:

Okay, I'm amazed to learn that someone with 2 years of ICU experience wasn't familiar with Versed, both in brand name and generic, its forms, its effects (and thus the need for monitoring), etc. She also should have been familiar with vec and that danger label should have meant something to her.

But again, by that point, she wasn't even looking at the box or the bottle, the label, etc. She was busy talking to an orientee about an entirely different issue and was just going through the physical motions of drawing up a substance, reconstituting it, and injecting it. Completely absent, as though she were a robot and her mind was in another place entirely.

Horrible.

Agreed and I find it impossible to describe this as an "honest mistake". Where do we draw the line?

[Workitinurfava, BSN, RN]

I am not surprised. They system will always look out for itself in the end especially when it involves the death of a person.

[mtnNurse., BSN]

1 hour ago, Wuzzie said:

Why do we continue to try to justify bad decisions as "mistakes"? When I made my med error I didn't make a mistake. I made a bad choice to not check an ID band and a med error resulted from that bad choice. I used poor judgement and that was on me.

Mistake just means "accidentally; in error". Since she didn't set out to kill this patient on purpose, I call it a mistake. "Bad decision" requires more thought, and I think the problem was she was not thinking but rather being mindless. We don't know all the factors that led her to be in a mindless state in those crucial moments. But because she was, it fits the definition of criminal negligence, not reckless homicide. Or arguments could be made that it doesn't even fit the definition of criminal negligence, but that too is subjective.

If your bad choice (are you sure it wasn't a mistake or did you consciously choose to skip the id band checking?) had resulted in a death, do you really think charging you with reckless homicide would've been acceptable, whether from an ethical or litigious standpoint? I don't think it's an acceptable charge from either standpoint.

1 hour ago, TriciaJ said:

would this nurse's standard of practice be adequate if your family member was the patient?

I think everyone here has agreed that her standard of practice was inadequate and unacceptable. It's the criminal charge we're debating.

[Wuzzie]

28 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

If your bad choice (are you sure it wasn't a mistake or did you consciously choose to skip the id band checking?) had resulted in a death, do you really think charging you with reckless homicide would've been acceptable, whether from an ethical or litigious standpoint? I don't think it's an acceptable charge from either standpoint.

It wasn't a mistake because I know the right way to do things and did not do it. If it resulted in a death then yes. By not doing things the correct way, and knowing better, I was being reckless with the patient's life which is why it scared the you know what out of me.

[Helo27]

I understand this is a touchy subject and an unpopular opinion. But if this was a truck driver who was way behind schedule & took a shortcut, speeding down a one way street but not reading the road signs & smashing into a pedestrian would your opinion of charges be different? It’s exactly the same thing only the deadly weapon was vecutonium & not a semi. The most basic principles of medication administration were not followed, she was speeding & not reading the signs. People trust us with their lives every single day, we have to be accountable. Yes mistakes happen, no one wants to blame the nurse because we have all had a really busy shift & think could that be me. There is no place for short cuts in medicine. You should never give a medication you aren’t familiar with or not know the reason you are giving it. If it doesn’t seem right that you are reconstituting a med, you should verify, if you don’t know the right dose, verify. You should not be giving a benzo & walk out (would have recognized a NMB with just 1 min observation). We chose a profession that mistakes can literally be deadly. The rights of medication administration didn’t stop at nursing school. Never forget in your routine day, bad things can still happen even if you’ve done it a thousand times, you could literally kill a person by taking a short cut & not reading the signs.

[mtnNurse., BSN]

4 minutes ago, Wuzzie said:

It wasn't a mistake because I know the right way to do things and did not do it. If it resulted in a death then yes. By not doing things the correct way, and knowing better, I was being reckless with the patient's life which is why it scared the you know what out of me. 

Well, just semantics about "mistake", but whatever you call what you did which you did not do on purpose (you intended right med for right person), I am very grateful that it did not cause you to no longer be a nurse. I'm sure you have been a way better nurse because of that incident.

There should be remedial rather than penal solutions when caregivers who have every intention of doing good end up making mistakes (using my dictionary's definition of 'mistakes'). If you can prove someone had a constant cavalier attitude about their important job, that's one thing. But if someone had momentary lapse of good judgement due to all the multiple factors that could have led someone to have a mindless mindset while rushing to grab a med and run deliver it...it just doesn't meet the criteria for criminal prosecution. Losing nursing license perhaps, or other solutions -- but not facing decades in prison for a felony offense!

[mtnNurse., BSN]

10 minutes ago, Helo27 said:

But if this was a truck driver who was way behind schedule & took a shortcut, speeding down a one way street but not reading the road signs & smashing into a pedestrian would your opinion of charges be different? It’s exactly the same thing

It's not exactly the same thing. What if she did not know she was speeding down a one way street? What if she had no doubt in her mind that she was on the right street, speeding yes, but knowing she wasn't about to hurt anyone? Obviously she was wrong. Obviously she "should have known". But again, hindsight is 20/20 and you have no idea what circumstances led her to become so mindless in those moments. It seems obvious to me that she did not have a doubt in her mind that she had the right medicine, that there wasn't the slightest chance she was about to hurt anyone -- because if she had a doubt, she would have checked and double-checked. She obliviously thought she was just knocking that task off the list and on to the next. She is to blame for that. But it doesn't meet criteria for criminal prosecution. She doesn't deserve (and no the law does not dictate that she does deserve) decades in prison followed by a life-time of being a felon for one mistake of giving one wrong medication.

[JadedCPN, BSN, RN]

28 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

It's not exactly the same thing. What if she did not know she was speeding down a one way street? What if she had no doubt in her mind that she was on the right street, speeding yes, but knowing she wasn't about to hurt anyone?

Doesn't change the fact that she killed a person even though she didn't mean to, even though she thought she was on the right street. .

Now, if there were no signs indicating what the speed was or that it was a one way street, one could argue that it was just a horrible mistake but she shouldn't be blamed because she had no warning.

However, in this instance there were multiple, multiple signs on the road that she, for whatever reason, did not take heed to which ultimately and directly resulted in a death.

[mtnNurse., BSN]

JadedCPN, yes she caused the death, yes she is to blame. That doesn't mean she's guilty of reckless homicide. Hopefully you read previous posts about this.

So are you saying you would feel it was morally and legally just to put her in prison for 12 years and then have her live out the rest of her life as a felon, obviously no easy way to live out the rest of your life?

[JadedCPN, BSN, RN]

5 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

JadedCPN, yes she caused the death, yes she is to blame. That doesn't mean she's guilty of reckless homicide. Hopefully you read previous posts about this.

So are you saying you would feel it was morally and legally just to put her in prison for 12 years and then have her live out the rest of her life as a felon, obviously no easy way to live out the rest of your life?

From my quick internet search, in Tennesee reckless homicide is defined per Tennessee Code 39-13-215 as "Reckless: means that a person acts recklessly with respect to circumstances surrounding the conduct or the result of the conduct when the person is aware of, but consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur. "

She disregarded all of the safety measures and checks that should be ingrained to her as a nurse. So yes, I do think the argument could be made that it fits reckless homicide.

And I would feel it is just as moral and legal to put her in jail for however many years for reckless homicide as it would be for someone else in a different profession who also made a horrible mistake that could have been prevented but cost someone their life.