Nurse Charged With Homicide

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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 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.

4 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

But what if she didn't know (though she 'should know') that she needed to monitor the patient after giving that med? There's a difference between poor judgement and recklessness -- recklessness means she knew and was conscious of the fact that by giving that med and walking away she could be killing that patient. I don't believe she was conscious of that -- if she had been, she would have thought to check the med or monitor.

Then she freaking should have looked it up. Recklessness is pushing a drug you have no idea about. ?

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7 hours ago, JadedCPN said:

Exactly! How can ignoring this be excused? No matter how busy, how short staffed, how whatever - how can we excuse blatantly ignoring a warning like this? Not to mention the other safety measures that were ignored. And how is a nurse ignoring/not paying attention to this when they are drawing up a medication much different than someone taking their eyes off the road while they are driving to look at a text.

How many alarms are ignored? Because ... well, everything is beeping, all of the time. Sometimes those alarms are because the diastolic BP went below 50. Sometimes they are because there is a tiny, harmless bubble in an IV line. Sometimes they are because a patient may be about to fall and break a bone, causing internal bleeding that may kill them. Sometimes, they are because the patient wants a sip of water. Human brains have a capacity to tune out or screen - "not see" - an amazing amount of both important and unimportant things. That's why so many other safety measures are often built in (many of them equally ineffective).

Another way in which this happens - signs inside and outside of a patient's room. Eventually, there are so many signs that all of them are ignored, even though some of them may help prevent harm or death.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0110274

(article on alarm fatigue, just so I have some EBP to back it up ?)

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1 hour ago, Wuzzie said:

I think we’re in agreement? ?

Yes!

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10 minutes ago, JadedCPN said:

I just can't agree that she didn't know she held a gun in her hands though.

How can you believe that she knew? If she knew, don't you think it's most likely she did not want to risk killing a patient that day? So if she was being aware of the dangers, don't you think she would have then become aware of the med in her hands?

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Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
On 2/6/2019 at 6:06 PM, dimama said:

For an error this significant to reach the patient this is failure of the system, thus a system error. She should not have even had access to this drug.

I agree; if she wasn't an ICU nurse, her Pyxis sign-in should not have allowed her access to Vecuronium OR Versed. I remember floating to off-service areas and having to have the charge of that unit sign out certain medications that I didn't have access to.

The nurse was relatively new -- she didn't know what she didn't know but she'd been around long enough to think she knew all she needed to know. That's a dangerous time in any nurse's career . . . I am just so sad for the patient, the family and the nurse who, I am sure, is beating herself up.

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1 minute ago, Ruby Vee said:

I agree; if she wasn't an ICU nurse, her Pyxis sign-in should not have allowed her access to Vecuronium OR Versed. I remember floating to off-service areas and having to have the charge of that unit sign out certain medications that I didn't have access to.

The nurse was relatively new -- she didn't know what she didn't know but she'd been around long enough to think she knew all she needed to know. That's a dangerous time in any nurse's career . . . I am just so sad for the patient, the family and the nurse who, I am sure, is beating herself up.

She was an ICU nurse with two years experience. Because the hospital had recently switched to Rocuronium she may or may not have been familiar with Vecuronium. I cannot fathom that she had not been exposed to Versed on numerous occasions.

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44 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

Sorry, I should've just quoted. I am solely rejecting the sanctimonious idea elsewhere above that any deviance from that which we were taught always amounts to a willful choice in the way that human beings usually think of having choices and making willful choices.

Being pulled in two compelling directions comes to mind. Susie and I have had this discussion before and her answer was basically that she wouldn't put herself in that situation.

Making a conscious choice to bypass basic safety procedures we have been taught in nursing school is a choice not a mistake. Distinguishing between the two is not sanctimonious. If I choose to sacrifice patient safety for whatever reason I have made a choice not a mistake.

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3 minutes ago, Susie2310 said:

Making a conscious choice to bypass basic safety procedures we have been taught in nursing school is a choice not a mistake. Distinguishing between the two is not sanctimonious. If I choose to sacrifice patient safety for whatever reason I have made a choice not a mistake.

To make a choice you have to be thinking. If she had been thinking about what she were doing, the fatal mistake would not have been made. (mistake meaning 'error' or 'accident' since we assume she didn't kill on purpose.) Do you really think she consciously chose to risk that person's life? Thought, "I need a lil' excitement, let me just skip all these safeguards just to see what happens"? No, she did not think that. She was in a rush on auto-pilot. I've seen nurses on a rush on auto-pilot everyday at some point in their long, break-less, stressful, over-worked, understaffed shifts.

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4 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

To make a choice you have to be thinking. If she had been thinking about what she were doing, the fatal mistake would not have been made. (mistake meaning 'error' or 'accident' since we assume she didn't kill on purpose.) Do you really think she consciously chose to risk that person's life? Thought, "I need a lil' excitement, let me just skip all these safeguards just to see what happens"? No, she did not think that. She was in a rush on auto-pilot. I've seen nurses on a rush on auto-pilot everyday at some point in their long, break-less, stressful, over-worked, understaffed shifts.

It's a nurse's professional and legal responsibility to think about what he/she is doing when one's actions or inactions have the power to harm or kill patients.

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Just now, Susie2310 said:

It's a nurse's professional responsibility to think about what he/she is doing when one's actions or inactions have the power to harm or kill patients.

Of course that is our responsibility! Do you think she had a serious lapse of judgement on purpose? My point is it's not "reckless homicide" -- she wasn't thinking that she was playing russian-roulette with a loaded gun! "Should have known", yes, but did not know.

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Honestly, I would want some of you perfect nurses to be my nurse if god forbid I go to the hospital -- the nurses who would never be worked so hard that they'd have a harmful lapse of judgement in giving care. I'm not kidding, I would want one of you to be my nurse. But I would pray to god you wouldn't be on my jury if god forbid I ever made a dreadful mistake despite how conscientious I always strive to be!

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Specializes in ACNP-BC, Adult Critical Care, Cardiology.
20 minutes ago, mtnNurse. said:

Honestly, I would want some of you perfect nurses to be my nurse if god forbid I go to the hospital -- the nurses who would never be worked so hard that they'd have a harmful lapse of judgement in giving care. I'm not kidding, I would want one of you to be my nurse.

I'm afraid we need to move away from this kind of thinking for the sake of our profession. There are no perfect nurses as we all agree, we all are capable of mistakes. But it's time for nurses to demand better working conditions where we are not worked so hard that we end up performing tasks without thinking things through. This should be a wake up call that enough is enough.

I find that it's really about fostering a culture of safety. I hate tooting our own horn here in California but the staffing ratio law here and the unions really made a difference in how nurses can pause and say that they can not take an assignment that would jeopardize a patient's well being or their license. I'm not sure it would prevent a similar incident here but I see a noticeable difference in nurse satisfaction for their role here than in the other state I worked at.

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