Patient's Suicide: Hospital Ruled Not At Fault For Hanging From Shower Rod
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
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Quick Summary: It is impossible to construct a 100% safe environment for psychiatric patients. The administrator and architect knew the danger shower curtain rods can pose to psychiatric patients who want to harm themselves by hanging.
They checked for specific state regulatory standards for shower curtain rods and found none.
They rejected a light aluminum pipe which gave way under little weight, because it broke into two pieces with sharp ends, which could be used as weapons.
They settled on a medium-weight plastic pipe which bent and gave way under seventy to eighty pounds, popping out of the holders on each end and falling to the floor. Each shower rod was tested in-house and tested and approved by state inspectors.
The patient hanged herself from one of the rod holders screwed firmly to the wall. COURT OF APPEALS OF TEXAS, 1997.
The Court of Appeals of Texas expressed its deepest sympathies to the parents of a young woman who committed suicide by hanging herself in the shower in her room in a psychiatric hospital.At the same time the court ruled the evidence would not support a wrongful death suit filed against the facility by the woman’s mother. The court noted in passing that the woman’s father had joined in the suit but then had expressly withdrawn.
The court disagreed with the allegation the hospital was negligent in the design and construction of the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. The court ruled further there was no negligence in the manner in which the hospital’s staff managed the young patient as a suicide risk.
On the second prong of the suit, the court ruled the hospital was not negligent for how it managed the suicide risk. The patient had cut her wrists with a piece of glass. She was placed on close suicide watch for two days, then placed on stepped-down thirty minute checks.
Her therapist believed her suicide risk was an impulsive pattern of acting out and that she did not have a potential for deliberately formulating and carrying out a suicide plan. There was a no-harm contract signed by the patient when the suicide precautions were stepped-down. It was believed that stepped-down suicide precautions and the explicit decision to leave the shower curtain rod in the bathroom would promote trust and thereby decrease the potential for her to act out self-destructively.
With the benefit of hindsight, the court recognized the staff's assessment of this patient's situation was not correct. However, according to the court, a psychiatric hospital is required by the law to take reasonable measures in light of its best professional judgment as to the forseeability of the patient doing self-harm, and is not judged before the law by perfect hindsight. Mounts vs. Hospital, 957 S.W. 2d 661 (Tex. App., 1997).