Wisconsin Nurse being charged with criminal neglect

[psalm_55]

what happened here is truly tragic -- but given the complex, understaffed and over worked conditions in most hospitals, well -- it, or something like it, could happen to many of us.

the nurse's name is "Julie". there is a link at this web site to email support to this nurse. Please join me in letting Julie know that we are with her.

ALL nursing organizations need to address this -- and muster as much support from other professional organizations to STOP THIS MADNESS of pressing criminal charges against a nurse who made an honest mistake.

by the way, where is the ANA??????????????

Since When Is It A Crime To Be Human?

ismp.org says it so well:

"The belief that a medication error could lead to felony charges, steep fines, and a jail sentence can also have a chilling effect on the recruitment and retention of healthcare providers--particularly nurses, who are already in short supply."

Please use this link to give support to that RN.

[Katnip, RN]

My hospital is in this system and we are told that as of now, there is a zero tolerance for any med errors.

Unlike Clarion in Indiana, where the nurses were not disciplined for the infants' deaths because they realized it was a system failure and worked to correct that, our system refuses to believe that anything administration has done (faulty policies) could have led to the error; so the nurses are hung out on the line. System failures? Not here!!!! Nope, the nurse is ALWAYS to blame!

Excellent way to drive nurses away in droves.

If you can't be protected when making med errors, then nurses aren't going to report them when they do happen, which in turn puts the patient at risk when the med error isn't caught in time.

I agree this nurse is responsible for her actions. Pull her license and sue for monetary value-if you can put a value on a human life. But jail time?

If making med errors becomes commonly criminalized then we're all at risK of winding up in jail.

It's easy to say it will never happen to you. But how many of you really want to take that risk?

[crackerjack]

I think there is more to this picture that we aren't seeing. I haven't read all the posts and will but at about halfway through, I'm seeing the same things repeatedly so here is my perspective.

Compassion. Do I have compassion for this nurse --he!! ya! I feel for her deeply. I hope and pray I never make such a serious mistake. I fear making such a tragic error.

Mistakes. Yes, plural. There are multiple mistakes that lead to the tragic outcomes in this case. That's just it, there were many mistakes. When is a mistake just a mistake though?

Criminal neglect. Do we have criminal neglect?

ne-glect /nɪˈglɛkt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ni-glekt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation -verb (used with object) 1.to pay no attention or too little attention to; disregard or slight: The public neglected his genius for many years. 2.to be remiss in the care or treatment of: to neglect one's family; to neglect one's appearance. 3.to omit, through indifference or carelessness: to neglect to reply to an invitation. 4.to fail to carry out or perform

neglect - Definitions from Dictionary.com

The scope of nursing practice

neglect in nursing, therefore, would be the failure to provide care, give too little attention to, be remiss in care or treatment of....that which any prudent nurse knows to do. Furthermore, due to the human fallibility we all possess, we have the 5 rights of medication administration. All patients have the right to safe care, including medication administration. We're taught in nursing school to adhere to these patient rights and any prudent nurse knows to do any less is neglect.

The nurse in this situation may have mistakenly failed to check something but for her to purposefully choose to skip an additional fail-safe of scanning the medication, she intentionally neglected her patient. At that point it was no longer human fallibility, it was a choice. That choice resulted in the death of a human being. Whether she meant for a life to be lost due to her choices is irrelevant. The drunk who chooses to get behind the wheel and drive probably doesn't mean for someone to die but if s/he hits and kills a person that doesn't make them any less dead. It's a matter of choices in this case.

Now, are her statements being maligned? Did she really say she purposely avoided using the scanning checkpoint? Is she color blind making the bright pink label appear less than alarming? There are a thousand questions we don't have the answers to at this point but going on just hte information we have, I can't agree that she should escape this with a slap on the wrist and escape criminal prosecution. A lot of things happen, physical damage, death or other losses that are due to actions where someone didn't mean to cause that outcome. When it comes to death, I think we have to look deeper than whether or not criminal prosecution is required to deter repeat performances by the same person in the future. We have to look at the future for all of us. Would the prosecution of a nurse who knowingly chose to avoid taking all medication administration precautions, including one that requires just scanning -not even reading and checking the MAR against the orders...would that make us all sit up and think twice about it before we did the same or similar? Maybe it will and maybe it won't but if this nurse is given a slap on the wrist and we all see that choosing to do things how we want versus following protocol of checking the 5 rights of med admin as well as any other fail-safe checks our institutions have set up to help us is seen as nothing more than a mistake that even when the results are a human fatality, won't we all feel justified in taking shortcuts and call it a mistake the next time it happens...even if it is one of us?

I'm afraid that the comparison between how other people for other actions doesn't hold any water. It's about what happened in this case not some doctor(s) action(s) or lack thereof, not the revolving door for drug crimes or anything else. It's about the standards we as nurses are held to when caring for the health and life of other human beings. Yes, we're held to a higher standard. We're entrusted with the weakest, with the strongest when made weak wtih illness, the vulnerable.

[tvccrn, ASN, RN]

I think that crackerjack has made some very valid points in a well-thought out and presented post.

tvccrn