Neonatal Nursing: Court Accepts Nurse’s Testimony.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
June 2016
The parents testified that when they phoned the hospital four hours after the newborn’s and mother’s discharge a nurse told them to put the baby on a windowsill in the sunlight which would help with his jaundice. When they called again the next day a nurse at the hospital told them to call their pediatrician. The baby was soon admitted to another hospital for bacterial meningitis.
The parents’ nursing expert testified it would be a violation of the standard of care for the nurse who took the first phone call from the parents not to have told them to phone their pediatrician or to bring the baby back to the hospital at that time. The Appellate Court of Illinois backed the trial judge’s decision to allow a nurse from the first hospital to testify. According to hospital records she was the labor and delivery nurse who had discharged the mother and baby and was still on duty when they called back. The Court’s decision was unusual and fortunate for the hospital to allow the nurse to testify as to what she would have done, without any chart note as to what the nurse actually said or did in response to the parents’ call.
First Bankers v. Hospital, 2016 WL 1733516 (Ill. App., April 29, 2016).More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/neonatal.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/neonatal-nursing-care.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/neonate-death-nurses-liability.htm