Nurse Charged With Homicide

Nurses General Nursing

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  1. Should Radonda Vaught, the nurse who gave a lethal dose of Vecuronium to patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, be charged with reckless homicide?

    • 395
      She should not have been charged
    • 128
      She deserved to be charged

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Radonda Vaught, a 35 year old nurse who worked at the University of 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.

Specializes in Med/Surg.

Reading all these responses has been really interesting. One question that keeps coming to my mind is ... when a law enforcement officer uses deadly force. It is so rare for someone to be charged, even though the news accounts sometimes paint a picture that makes the officer's actions seem reckless or at very least, an overreaction.

Are there parallels to nursing practice? How are they the same or different?

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On 2/5/2019 at 8:03 PM, Nurse Beth said:

Perhaps she wasn't fully trained to be a "help all" nurse. She wasn't familiar with Versed, so clearly a lack of experience.

Meaning...why did Vanderbilt put her in this position? Shame.

I worked at Vanderbilt for a few years up until last month. (I only left so I could stay st home with a baby). The “help all” Nurse is an extra nurse that is staffed to go around helping anyone who needs help and who helps cover lunches. If you’re busy and a pt needs a new IV or a glucose stick or help pulling up a pt, etc...it’s just an extra set of hands (and a brain) to keep everyone caught up. There is no extra training required beyond an RN license. Normally though the “help all” might watch the other nurses patients so he or she could run down to radiology and administer the medication themselves.

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3 hours ago, TriciaJ said:

This is why I think the hospital is as culpable as the nurse.

For those who think it's an honest error that any one of us could make, and her guilty conscience should be punishment enough: would this nurse's standard of practice be adequate if your family member was the patient? If it was your loved one, would you be accepting of a nurse who couldn't be bothered with the 5 rights?

Honestly, I think I would be accepting. Smart, caring, conscientious people do STUPID THINGS. All of them.
Someone mentioned "the human element" several pages back and I think that's 99% of what makes me not want to see this nurse in prison. Brains "misfire". People do things like look frantically for their own glasses while they're wearing them. Sometimes the stakes are much higher, but it doesn't turn us into machines incapable of error. And I do believe inattention is a sort of error.
In exchange for the "gift" of medicine, I think we have to accept that things are going to go horribly wrong sometimes.

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2 hours 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.

Yes, if the patient had died it would have been because of your bad (reckless) choice, not your mistake, as you had been trained to do things correctly and chose not to. I don't believe that people who are trained as nurses are unable to tell the difference. Choice means to select and mistake means to misjudge. It's not difficult to understand the difference unless one chooses to try to obfuscate the issue.

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31 minutes ago, Susie2310 said:

Yes, if the patient had died it would have been because of your bad (reckless) choice, not your mistake, as you had been trained to do things correctly and chose not to. I don't believe that people who are trained as nurses are unable to tell the difference. Choice means to intentionally select and mistake means to misjudge. It's not difficult to understand the difference unless one chooses to try to obfuscate the issue.

I think we’re in agreement? ?

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On 2/5/2019 at 8:15 PM, Pixie.RN said:

She hasn't even been a nurse for 4 full years. This happened two years ago. She was still so new. I am horrified by this, I think it's too much. I am sure she lives with this every day as it is. I hope she is getting the support she needs to get through this.

It happened the day after Christmas in 2017. A little over a year ago.

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?

Can it be said that for the most part there are no mistakes in nursing, then?

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5 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

?

Can it be said that for the most part there are no mistakes in nursing, then?

How about a drug calculation error?

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Well, if you can't do math and were reckless enough not to do enough double checks to find out that you were making an error [or, shall we say, "choice not to do math correctly"], and you willingly put yourself in a position in life where making a math error could harm someone.....

Anyway, when I was a new grad I willfully chose to refuse to understand in real time that I was confused about OxyContin and oxycodone (which was 'IR' but didn't say so). Both were pt's PRN orders and both came in dose forms that allowed me to cut the wrong thing in half to get what I thought was the right thing. Luckily, fate chose for my willful evil actions to be therapeutic for both the patient and the rest of my nursing career.

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1 hour ago, JadedCPN said:

Reckless: means

I wish you would go back and read my post about that. But you have a right to your opinion and of course the law will be interpreted based on others' opinions. I hope the jury shares my opinion of how, as I previously explained, her behavior does not fit the definition of "reckless homicide". At very worst, it'd fit "criminal negligence".

It's sad to me that so many people think this nurse with her one tragic error of a wrong medicine owes the rest of her life to paying for that error. Someone previously wanted to know how we would feel if it were our family who'd been killed -- well how would you feel if it were your loved one who made the mistake? Devastated, but "yes, my child deserves to spend 12 years in prison for this, followed by life-sentence of being a felon"? Or your spouse? Or you? I kinda doubt you'd feel that way if it were your loved one, but if you would then I just feel sad that such a harsh penalty is your solution.

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23 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

?

Can it be said that for the most part there are no mistakes in nursing, then?

I get what you’re saying but where do we draw the line?

Drug calculation errors as mentioned above, pump programming errors, misunderstood orders, missing an order, etc.

Ignoring basic principals of medication administration that are drilled into our heads from the very beginning is not a mistake. For heavens sake she admitted to not even looking at the name of the medication on the vial. Who does that?

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18 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

Anyway, when I was a new grad I willfully chose to refuse to understand in real time that I was confused about OxyContin and oxycodone (which was 'IR' but didn't say so). Both were pt's PRN orders and both came in dose forms that allowed me to cut the wrong thing in half to get what I thought was the right thing. Luckily, fate chose for my willful evil actions to be therapeutic for both the patient and the rest of my nursing career.

Come on JKL. I have a metric butt ton of respect for you but I never, ever mentioned the word evil. What happened to you was understandable because the medications were basically the exact same thing. The only difference was their formulation. It would be easy for a new grad to confuse the two. Especially if the order wasn’t clear which appears to be the case.

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