Emergency Room: Nurses Faulted In Patient's Death
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
May 1996
The patient should have been placed and kept on a cardiac monitor.
A cardiac monitor must be watched by a competent person, either by staying with the patient continuously or by continuously monitoring the patient’s status by remote telemetry at a central location.
Alarms on a monitor can be set to sound for changes in the patient’s cardiac status, but the court did not approve of the use of alarms as a substitute for continuous close monitoring of a cardiac patient.
The nurses did not even look in upon the patient.
A seventy-six year old woman was brought to the hospital’s emergency room by paramedics for chest pains and shortness of breath.
A discrepancy between the paramedics' record of the time of arrival and the time originally noted in the hospital records was apparently eliminated by alteration of the records by the hospital emergency room nurses.
The nursing staff placed the patient in a room by herself. They did not continue the use of oxygen which had been started by the paramedics. COURT OF APPEAL OF LOUISIANA, 1995.
The family was alerted by telephone by a friend that their mother was taken to the hospital by fire department paramedics when she developed shortness of breath and complained of chest pains while playing bingo at a church social hall.
The son, his wife and children raced to the hospital, but were told by the nursing staff in the emergency department that their mother was not there. The son went over to the social hall, and was reassured that his mother had, in fact, been taken to the hospital.
He went back to the hospital, searched the individual cubicles in the emergency room himself, found his mother, and noted she was seated alone, by herself, fully clothed, without oxygen and without a heart monitor attached. He asked someone to come and help her. He went back into the room. His mother complained of indigestion-type chest pains. He tried to help her up to the bathroom, but she collapsed unconscious. He ran out screaming for help.
A code was called. Even with the efforts of several nurses, the emergency room physician and a cardiologist, she could not be revived. She was pronounced dead one hour and fifteen minutes after the paramedics’ record noted she had arrived at the hospital emergency room.
The family sued the hospital for medical malpractice and wrongful death. The jury entered a verdict of no liability in favor of the defendant hospital, which the lower court judge threw out in favor of a substantial judgment for damages in favor of the family. The Louisiana Court of Appeal upheld the lower court judge in awarding damages to the family notwithstanding the jury’s decision that the hospital should not be liable. The court did reduce the damages by 10%, as it felt there was just a 90% likelihood the patient would have come out of the hospital alive even without any negligence by the nursing staff. Gordon vs. Medical Center, 661 So. 2d 991 (La. App., 1995).