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.

Please please please allnurses help support this poor nurse however possible. This is a horrible direction for our profession.

thank you

3 Votes
5 hours ago, juan de la cruz said:

Vecuronium is supplied as a 10 mg dose vial in powder form that must be reconstituted. The nurse mixed the powder with 10 ml of sterile bacteriostatic saline to make it a 1:1 concentration. The nurse gave 1 ml (or 1 mg) because the order was for Versed 1 mg IV x 1, may give another 1 mg x 1 if needed. She did read the instructions for reconstituting the drug but not the drug name and ignored the warning on the cap that says paralytic agent. The whole story is outright inconceivable but that's how it happened.

Again, this is all in the CMS report.

There were two syringes left in the baggie. One had 2ml of fluid left in it. The other had 8ml. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that the medication was in the syringe with 8ml left and she thought it was Versed diluted 1/1 then that would have been 2mg administered which just makes it worse. She didn’t even administer it correctly if she thought she gave only 1mg. I’m sorry but there are just too many poor decisions and missteps here from one person for it to be a system problem.

4 Votes
Specializes in ACNP-BC, Adult Critical Care, Cardiology.
47 minutes ago, Wuzzie said:

There were two syringes left in the baggie. One had 2ml of fluid left in it. The other had 8ml. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that the medication was in the syringe with 8ml left and she thought it was Versed diluted 1/1 then that would have been 2mg administered which just makes it worse. She didn’t even administer it correctly if she thought she gave only 1mg. I’m sorry but there are just too many poor decisions and missteps here from one person for it to be a system problem.

Right. That's why I said in a previous post how outright inconceivable her actions were. It was one misstep after another, and another...I'd have so many questions to ask her if I were investigating the case but all her answers won't matter because it seems that she honestly thought she gave the patient Versed. We all agree that she didn't show up to Radiology with the intention to kill this patient. To me there is really no defending her...a momentary loss of common sense or reasoning is not even a thing. She practiced dangerously and what bothers me is that she took a job at another ICU in another hospital after she was fired. I also wonder why the Tennessee BON haven't conducted their own investigation. Having said that, I am on the camp that believes she should lose her RN license but not be criminally charged.

5 Votes
15 minutes ago, juan de la cruz said:

Right. That's why I said in a previous post how outright inconceivable her actions were. It was one misstep after another, and another...I'd have so many questions to ask her if I were investigating the case but all her answers won't matter because it seems that she honestly thought she gave the patient Versed. We all agree that she didn't show up to Radiology with the intention to kill this patient. To me there is really no defending her...a momentary loss of common sense or reasoning is not even a thing. She practiced dangerously and what bothers me is that she took a job at another ICU in another hospital after she was fired. I also wonder why the Tennessee BON haven't conducted their own investigation. Having said that, I am on the camp that believes she should lose her RN license but not be criminally charged.

As I’ve stated before, maybe ad nauseum?, my biggest issue is her lack of monitoring the patient after she gave what she thought was Versed. This is ICU nursing 101. She was reckless in every single step of this fiasco. I believe criminal charges in some form should be brought although I don’t know, because I’m not an attorney, which one would be most appropriate. We have to draw a line somewhere and I think this is it. We, as nurses, cannot be cavalier with our practice and slaps on the wrist for supremely awful nursing judgment will just allow this behavior to continue. I don’t for a second believe the “sky is falling” mentality that this is going to cause people not to pursue nursing as a career. Rather it just might weed out those people who shouldn’t have pursued it in the first place.

4 Votes

I don't have enough information to decide if she should be charged or not. The hospital is not going to support her because if she can get charged and convicted they would be released from liability. The family needs to sue the hospital for fail safe measures not being in place. I think some things are left out but I know what I would ask if I was on the jury.

0 Votes
8 hours ago, HomeBound said:

The other thing that is really ticking me off is the deletion of her twitter, facebook, snapchat and all that social media--

her lawyer is advising her well. Why?

Because they can and will pull every single social media post of hers, and perhaps even get hold of her phone---to see if she posted anything in the minutes preceding or directly post infusion, when she should have been WORKING.

Why wouldn't she get off social media? Her lawyer most likely doesn't want her saying anything about the case. And she'd probably be getting death threats and crappy comments from all the psychos out there who get in to that kind of thing. The prosecution can still get into her phone if they are interested in doing so. All it requires is a search warrant, and their forensic IT guys can find anything they need.

7 Votes
45 minutes ago, litbitblack said:

The family needs to sue the hospital for fail safe measures not being in place.

There are no fail safe measures. What can the hospital to do to ensure nurses always follow the 5 rights?

1 Votes

How do we know that the hospital didn't set some of these things up?, like planting the syringes, they definitely aren't on her side and probably want to hurry up and just be done with the whole case. The hospital didn't allow for any mental evaluations to be done on the nurse, yet concluded all of these things. Maybe something was going on with her mental state at the time.

0 Votes

Over 40,000 people die every year in this country due to medication errors. That would be 40,000 nurses, doctors and pharmacists on trial for accidental homicide. Now THAT would cause a nursing shortage.

2 Votes
Specializes in ACNP-BC, Adult Critical Care, Cardiology.
53 minutes ago, mtmkjr said:

There are no fail safe measures. What can the hospital to do to ensure nurses always follow the 5 rights?

I think bar code scanning could have saved the patient's life and snapped this nurse's brain back to the realization that she had the wrong medication in her hands. It's no excuse for her actions but we now know these mistakes can happen so why not ensure that extra layer of protection at all times. Would she override that too? that is certainly possible but we also have to reassure the public that systems such as bar code scanning exist for their protection. I spoke to a layman friend about this case and his reaction was "now I'm afraid to be a patient in a hospital".

1 Votes
8 hours ago, juan de la cruz said:

OK last point which I think is very important and could have saved this poor patient. Why doesn't Vanderbilt have bar code scanning for med administration in Radiology? All that is needed is a workstation on wheels with a scanner in all departments. I work for a similar-sized institution and nurses are not allowed to administer medications without bar code scanning in non-emergent situations, no exceptions!

I don't disagree and they had plans to roll it out in radiology. They were within several weeks of a their new (huge) EMR rollout when this happened.

However, although it would have been another precaution, I don't encourage anyone to use BCMS as a primary tool. It's a second or third check, aka "confirmation" at best. I see plenty of people who grab stuff out of machine and don't look carefully at it - because they plan to scan. Although they are a great tool, the ways in which they have been promoted is unfortunate. There just is no substitute for the 5Rs and I think we should spend some energy on promoting that, low-tech and uncool as it may be.

9 Votes

Before a nurse pulls a certain med ( medication like the one the nurse gave ) there should be some verbal oversight by the pharmacy. You should need a special code that you get from the pharmacist. The pharmacist should question the heck out of you as to why you need this override code. A machine is a machine all day long and despite the nurse not checking things on her part it still doesn't negate that a woman was killed. How will this change in the future if ths hospital doesn't have a better way of handling this?

0 Votes
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