Head Injury: Jury Faults The Physician But Does Not Fault Nursing Assessments And Care.

Head Injury: Jury Faults The Physician But Does Not Fault Nursing Assessments And Care.

Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession

July 2016

A surgeon, while making rounds, should find out whether the patient is having pain and what medications are being given.

That information is readily available by talking to the nurses and by reviewing the medication administration record and the nursing progress notes.

The nurses are not at fault for the fact the extent of the patient’s intracranial injury was not timely diagnosed. COURT OF APPEALS OF OHIO June 30, 2016

The patient was hospitalized after an automobile accident in which he suffered very obvious head and facial trauma. While awaiting surgery to correct fractures to his eye sockets and jaw, he began to have severe headaches. His nurses carefully documented the patient’s complaints of pain and their administration of oral acetaminophen and Percocet. The nurses assessed the pain by asking the patient to rate it on a scale of one to ten. They repeatedly charted that the pain reported by the patient was nine or ten out of ten on that scale.

The surgeon who was going to operate on the patient’s facial fractures repeatedly came in to see the patient but at no time felt a neurology consult was needed regarding the headaches.

When the facial surgery was finally done the patient would not wake up. A CT scan revealed a subdural hematoma. When a hole was drilled in the skull blood spurted out. The patient soon died.

The Court of Appeals of Ohio affirmed a jury verdict which faulted the physician but not the nurses. The nurses assessed their patient’s ongoing complaints of severe headaches competently, administered medications to their patient appropriately in accordance with the physician’s orders and documented carefully their assessments and interventions.

The information the nurses generated was readily available to the surgeon who was ruled negligent for failing to follow up with neurology. Whitmer v. Zochowski, 2016 WL 3579012 (Ohio App., June 30, 2016).