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.

Several off-topic threads have been removed. This thread has nothing to do with educational levels of nurses but rather acts of omission and poor choices by ONE nurse. Please keep the discussion on this and ALL other threads ON TOPIC. Threads that are posted in an attempt to derail the threads will be removed and points issued.

2 Votes
Specializes in LTC & Teaching.

With absolutely no disrespect intended, education does play a huge role in this case. Yes we are talking about poor choices of ONE Nurse. However, what is the educational training of that ONE Nurse.

Did this Nurse have proper training on how to deal with situations where she had to do the various overides.?

Did she have proper orientation to the type of unit in which she worked?

There are countless other examples in which I can illustrate here. Having said that I will mention the teachings of the late Dr. Edwards Deming. Dr. Deming always mentioned that if the system is incredibly flawed, there is limited chance in which the worker can achieve a positive outcome. Managers and Administrators create the policies and procedures in which the workers work in. How can the worker achieve a possitive outcome if those policies and procedures are flawed?

I'm not making excuses for this One Nurse. What I am saying is that the system/environment in which she worked in must also be reviewed.

An example of this is the Canadian Nurse who killed several seniors in Nursing Homes by overdosing them with insulin. Yes this Nurse was charged and convicted. Yet in a rare case of doing the right thing, the Ontario Government held a public inquiry into Long Term Care facilities in Ontario in order to examine safegaurds and other aspects of Nursing Homes in order to prevent this from happening again. I was proud of the fact that I submitted a 67 page document to that Inquiry last year and I'm eager to read the full report when it comes out later this year.

Specializes in NICU/Neonatal transport.

She did have the education, training and experience. She was a bachelor's prepared nurse I believe, because she was seeking her MSN.

The failure or flaw in the system was her. If you want to talk about why she wasn't discovered earlier, I would guess the system caught her every time before.

4 Votes

Yes, any updates? Thanks.

20 hours ago, AN Admin Team said:

Several off-topic threads have been removed. This thread has nothing to do with educational levels of nurses but rather acts of omission and poor choices by ONE nurse. Please keep the discussion on this and ALL other threads ON TOPIC. Threads that are posted in an attempt to derail the threads will be removed and points issued.

With all due respect, anything having to do with inpatient care (that is to say, anything that theoretically could be a factor in the care of an inpatient) is fair game for discussion, even if it may be successfully counter-argued or proven that the point is not particularly relevant in this case. Someone has died, CMS has found multiple deficiencies to the extent that a system was put in IJ status, and an individual is charged with reckless homicide.

I guess I must not have seen the posts in question, but I'm hoping there was something more offensive about them than their general subject matter. Otherwise, this is disappointing.

2 minutes ago, JKL33 said:

With all due respect, anything having to do with inpatient care (that is to say, anything that theoretically could be a factor in the care of an inpatient) is fair game for discussion, even if it may be successfully counter-argued or proven that the point is not particularly relevant in this case. Someone has died, CMS has found multiple deficiencies to the extent that a system was put in IJ status, and an individual is charged with reckless homicide.

I guess I must not have seen the posts in question, but I'm hoping there was something more offensive about them than their general subject matter. Otherwise, this is disappointing.

The post was panurse going on about bsn, msn education and basically the same rant on constant rotation in the nurse welfare pipeline thread and all the others that are basically similar and started by the same person. IE it wasn't relevant to this thread. To say the nurse in this story needed further education or was a hazard, yes. But the post basically trashed bsn, msn education as a whole and literally just about every regurgitated rant on every post by that same person as though they have an axe to grind.

3 Votes

Ah. Thanks for the info. ?

1 Votes

I still do not believe that she should be charged with reckless homicide. An unfortunate error. It doesn't mattet if she's a BScN it happens. This needs to be dealt with but not reckless homicide as she was neither drunk nor on drugs at the time of this incident. A horrible mistake

1 Votes
35 minutes ago, rudecat said:

I still do not believe that she should be charged with reckless homicide. An unfortunate error. It doesn't mattet if she's a BScN it happens. This needs to be dealt with but not reckless homicide as she was neither drunk nor on drugs at the time of this incident. A horrible mistake

Read both the CMS and the TBI reports and see if you feel the same way. Particularly pages 50-52 of the TBI report.

4 Votes

I am putting up a better reply. Not making light of this horrible, awful event. Not at all. My point in the last one I posted, was that when we habitually (trained and ingranied) do so many of the exact same things, like point/ click, sometimes it becomes almost like a reflex. Point/ click. So, she clicked through 4 warnings, and got the machine to overide. Did you ever hurriedly click through all the junk, so you could hit "med administered" and finally move on to the next screen?

I am not trivializing this. Its just that feeling I got when I went to my car , and put it in reverse, to back it out, but this time, my garage door was closed, and its never closed. Out of habit, I did not look, because I never look, I just back out.

No way Sam. Not a crime. Just not.

1 Votes
17 hours ago, panurse9999 said:

Did you ever hurriedly click through all the junk, so you could hit "med administered" and finally move on to the next screen?

Nope and I also follow the 5 rights every. single. time.

5 Votes

Being charged is not the same as being convicted. Being charged provides the community a chance to see and weigh the evidence.

Whenever someone dies at the hands of another person I think serious thought should be put into considering a community verdict.

4 Votes
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