Nursing Errors                                    

Hospital administrators in Utah describe the nursing shortage in the state as “acute.” This poor nursing-to-patient ratio results in overworked and often under-trained nurses.

Common Cases:

• Nurses fail to give the right medication at the right time or dosage.
• Nurses fail to call the doctor and report a patient’s declining condition.
• Nurses forget to regularly turn immobile patients in their beds causing decubitus ulcers (bed sores).
• Nurses ignore alarms on machines that track vital signs.

Actual Case:
$75.9M awarded in October 2005 in New Jersey

The Case:
Infant’s oxygen tube was dislodged following surgery resulting in quadriplegia with reduced vision and cognitive delays.

The details:
The plaintiff, age four months at the time, was recovering from surgery to remove a spinal cyst when his oxygen tube became dislodged. The nurses failed to notice and he went without oxygen for between ten and fifteen minutes. Now age six, the plaintiff is quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair, nearly blind and cognitively delayed.

The plaintiff claimed that the defendant pediatric intensive care nurse failed to properly supervise or act promptly on discovering that the tube was out of place, that another nurse had negligently applied Norcuron (a paralytic) to stop any further jostling of the tube, which suppressed the ability to breathe and that the supervising anesthetist failed to act in a timely manner after the tube was out of place. Two physicians were faulted for negligently supervising the anesthetist.

According to a published account, a $75.9 million verdict was returned.