Radonda Vaught Trial

[tnbutterfly - Mary]

"Fourteen Nashvillians were chosen Monday, March 21, 2022 to sit as a jury in the case of RaDonda Vaught, a former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse charged in the death of a patient. She faces charges of reckless homicide and impaired adult abuse in the 2017 death of Charlene Murphey."

For more on this story, see

Jury chosen in homicide trial of ex-Vanderbilt nurse RaDonda Vaught after fatal drug error

RaDonda Vaught’s Arraignment - Guilty or Not of Reckless Homicide and Patient Abuse?

Tennessee Nurse RaDonda Vaught - Legal Perspectives of Fatal Medication Error

What do you think the verdict should/will be?

[nursebert, MSN]

5 hours ago, Wuzzie said:

I’m laying bets it will be a fine and probation. Without a nursing license and the ability to buy weapons she isn’t much of a danger to anyone but herself. Her lawyer needs to stop letting her talk to the press though. Some of the stuff she’s said really reflects poorly on her and may influence sentencing. 

Agreed.  She gave an interview where she was smiling inappropriately and was quite condescending when referring to the prosecution team. She also used the s word as well as the f word. She is a disgrace to the nursing profession and it seems obvious that many of her supporters have not read the CMS report to know all the details. I am deeply offended by all the comments that state “ It could have happened to any nurse.”  Umm, no way.  She was a NUERO ICU NURSE.  How could she be so negligent?

[nursebert, MSN]

2 hours ago, JKL33 said:

I agree with the revocation of license and the legal accountability.

The main way I think this should change nursing would be for nurses to stop trying so hard to please and comply no matter how terrible the circumstances get. The people-pleasers should pay attention.

Same for those who let admins' rules (which change by the day) substitute for thinking and assessing.

Same for those whose self-esteem depends upon others' approval in one way or another. If you need to be the can-do super nurse or the get-er-done coyboy/girl or the best IV starter or just a run-of-the-mill careless know-it-all, you should be scared.

If you can't walk into a situation and do the things you were trained to do, methodically, you should be scared.

I'm also not so sure a little malicious compliance isn't in order.

If the hospital just had to "go live" with their EMR and it doesn't work, >> well, ??‍♀️>> that sounds like a "them" problem and they need to fix it, not tell nurses to use the override function or tell us that a ticket has already been submitted. That shouldn't be good enough any more.

If they are "short-staffed "well, ??‍♀️, I don't know what to tell you. There are a lot of rules I need to follow and I should be able to do most of them with 3, maybe 4 patients. I guess if you don't have enough nurses here to accomplish that you will need to start calling some people." That is a "them" problem. So maybe they should call their supervisor or the CNO or the CEO or the board president and figure out what to do.

If they want the nurse to do a drive-by Versed administration, just say no. That has always been in our own power.

Judge everything by what you were taught and not by circumstances.

I don't participate in scenarios where only some people are expected to be accountable.

If you're going to be held to the standard of a prudent nurse no matter what insane circumstances you were dealing with, you'd better be being a prudent nurse no matter how insane the circumstances. If that ruffles somebody's little panties, they will have to figure out how they're going to deal with it.

I love this.  This is the most thoughtful and intelligent comment that I have seen in several days.

[mtmkjr, BSN]

25 minutes ago, Mommavik said:

Mtmjkr   I can agree that she is at fault and that her error goes beyond "just" an error to negligence.  She did have choices and made the wrong ones.  So yes, you are correct that this is not something that should be left at the hospital or board level.  My feeling, however, is still that she should not be alone in this.  She isn't the only person responsible for this fiasco. She made the error that caused a death and bypassed numerous safety protocols to do so.  The hospital was liable in that they made it possible for that medication to be accessed without much effort.  The Doctors and hospital did not do what they were responsible for doing; ie. reporting the incident that caused a death;  in fact they told the medical examiner that the death was from "natural causes". So where is the prosecution or punishment for any of this? Only one person has ANY  liability?? I call foul!

I'm totally with you on Vanderbilt. It is not right at all that there wouldn't be serious consequences for their cover up.

I'm surprised the actual syringe with unwasted waste and the vial were kept for an entire year before they had the surprise CMS visit. What else do they have in their risk management evidence room...

 

[Mommavik, ADN]

tmjkr   I can agree that she is at fault and that her error goes beyond "just" an error to negligence.  She did have choices and made the wrong ones.  So yes, you are correct that this is not something that should be left at the hospital or board level.  My feeling, however, is still that she should not be alone in this.  She isn't the only person responsible for this fiasco. She made the error that caused a death and bypassed numerous safety protocols to do so.  The hospital was liable in that they made it possible for that medication to be accessed without much effort.  The Doctors and hospital did not do what they were responsible for doing; ie. reporting the incident that caused a death;  in fact they told the medical examiner that the death was from "natural causes". So where is the prosecution or punishment for any of this? Only one person has ANY  liability?? I call foul!

[JKL33]

3 hours ago, Mommavik said:

In this case,  she was a "floating" nurse, not familiar with this unit,

This is not true

3 hours ago, Mommavik said:

She asked and was told that she did not need to stay and monitor the patient after she gave this "Versed ".

No neuro ICU nurse should need to get the answer to this particular question from another person.  Actually, the question itself was just pointless. The patient is already down there, either being monitored or not being monitored. Irrelevant. When YOU get down there and see the situation--the patient is unmonitored, not even under visual surveillance--and you're there with your IV sedative, you should know not to shoot it in and walk away.

 

3 hours ago, Mommavik said:

It SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE TO OVERRIDE IN PYXIS without at least 2 person entering codes to obtain.

What if both of them use an RV level of vigilance? Or what if the second one is one of the cowboys who says "I trust you!" while blindly typing their initials then walking out (which is a thoroughly rampant practice, by the way)?

3 hours ago, Mommavik said:

It should also have been labeled prominently as a paralytic, requiring a patient to be on a ventilator.

But if you don't look enough to see the part where it says "vecuronium" it really doesn't matter if it says  point blank "this will kill your patient"

3 hours ago, Mommavik said:

The nurse told her not to document this, that it "would automatically document" (not sure how, since she couldn't do another safety measure in radiology- scan the barcode before administration of the med. There was no scanner there.) 

This is where not being someone who just floats through life doing whatever some hare-brained admin says comes into play. What about the part where you, the registered nurse, are responsible for creating a proper legal record of someone's health care? You don't document any part of a patient's care because so-and-so told you the magical EMR would take care of everything? Baloney. On the other hand, I see why RV felt no need to document patient care as long as the med was noted by the magical EMR machine because she literally did no other patient care.

 

[JKL33]

2 hours ago, mtmkjr said:

Vanderbilt was in the wrong in covering up the incident, but that does not make them responsible in any way for the patients death. That was 100% on Radonda

I disagree even after participating in these discussions and reading very sensible and compelling commentary from the other side.

They didn't cause RV not to look/read. But they contributed several other MAJOR components:

1. They run the kind of place where someone like RV freely roams, and is even given responsibilities beyond staff RN, despite having a relative small amount of experience and an even lesser degree of actual expertise. They had CM in their place of business, and they exposed her to this caliber of care, knowingly. [I give Darren a tiny break because he was on orientation, but let's not forget that their orientee RN who would soon become the newest cowboy in charge of patient care stood right there and watched RV do all this stuff with a paralytic labeled vecuronium]. Even Vanderbilt knows THEY ARE ultimately responsible, which is why they paid the hush money.

2. They run a culture where override is just another day. Where overriding for utter non-emergencies is just another day.

3. They went live with a new EMR when they were unprepared to do so and overrides were all the more needed in order to get through their stupid EMR launch (I experienced exact same frustration and response with EMR launches at various places). People might say, "But that didn't make RV not know the word midazolam and it didn't make her not read the label." That is true, but what this kind of culture does is create a very ingrained baseline where override is not a big deal. It becomes just another way to get a med. And with that, its benefit is completely lost.

4. Not only do they employ negligent employees, they employ the kind of people who run parts of the show but still don't know that an EMR isn't a magic machine, the kind of people who haven't gotten around to figuring out how to deliver care in all of the areas where care is delivered (e.g. their big money-making machine is downstairs but they can't figure out how to monitor the patients down there), the kind of people who don't document patient care, the kind of people who hire inexperienced nurses and give them (what should be considered) very lofty responsibilities, the kind of people who make sure there is a "help-all" because the staffing is otherwise too tight for nurses to deliver proper patient care, the kind of people who take evidence and leave it just laying around unsecured because they know they aren't going to report anything, the kind of people who DON'T report sentinel events, the kind of people who flout the law and just willingly refuse to follow it.  All of these types of people are crawling around that place. Yeah...you better believe they did their part to kill Charlene Murphy and others.

 

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Quote

“The jury’s conviction of Radonda Vaught was not an indictment against the nursing profession or the medical community. This case was and always has been about the gross neglect by Radonda Vaught that caused the death of Charlene Murphey. This was not a ‘singular’ or ‘momentary’ mistake.

Multiple health care professionals were on the jury. The jury found a series of decisions were made by Vaught to ignore her nursing training and instead failed to adhere to safety protocols that proved to be fatal.

The jury felt this level of care was so far below the proper standard of a reasonable and prudent nurse that the verdict was justified.”

https://www.wsmv.com/2022/03/26/district-attorney-releases-new-information-regarding-former-vanderbilt-nurses-trial/

[Lunah, MSN, RN]

Imagine, if only she'd typed in "VER" instead of just "VE," she might have just given some verapamil, potentially less deadly. So sad, that poor patient. I hope the Murphey family can move on now.

22 hours ago, Wolf at the Door said:

The cause and affect of such a verdict will have a magnitude affect on the State of TN , Nashville, and Vanderbilt. 

If I was a travel nurse I would not step foot in that state. If I ever considered relocating I only see 49 states right now. TN is automatically out. I once worked in that state for a year and would NEVER EVER after this verdict. I am not alone in this thinking. I have talked to people from there the answer is now NO! Nurses from Texas have told me NO! I think a lot of travel nurses might boycott working in that state. That states residents will suffer from a nursing shortage. Magnitude affect. 

Do you believe that TN is the only state that has convicted a nurse of criminal negligence? 

[Wuzzie]

31 minutes ago, Rose_Queen said:

https://www.wsmv.com/2022/03/26/district-attorney-releases-new-information-regarding-former-vanderbilt-nurses-trial/

Wow. Just wow! Why is her attorney even letting her speak to anyone? It just gets worse and worse. Her continued lack of good judgement is just appalling. 

[MunoRN, RN]

58 minutes ago, Wuzzie said:

Wow. Just wow! Why is her attorney even letting her speak to anyone? It just gets worse and worse. Her continued lack of good judgement is just appalling. 

What comment are you referring to from the article?

1 hour ago, Wuzzie said:

Wow. Just wow! Why is her attorney even letting her speak to anyone? It just gets worse and worse. Her continued lack of good judgement is just appalling. 

Attorneys don't control their clients, they counsel and represent them in legal matters.