Telemetry: Only One Nurse’s Pager Received Alarm.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
October 2017
No explanation was ever found for the fact that alarms from this patient were programmed only to go to one nurse’s rather than two nurses’ pagers. Nevertheless the one nurse was fired legitimately because she had no credible excuse for failing to respond to repeated alarms from her patient. APPELLATE COURT OF ILLINOIS September 5, 2017
A patient died in the cardiac telemetry unit after at least a dozen asystole alarms to her nurse’s pager went unanswered. The patient was discovered in distress by another nurse and a code was called, but it was too late.
When interviewed in the facility’s subsequent investigation the nurse claimed she was in the hospital lobby discharging a patient and wanted to wait for the patient’s ride to arrive. However, review of the surveillance camera footage failed to show the nurse was ever there. After the nurse was fired she sued for race discrimination.
The Appellate Court of Illinois dismissed the case. The facility went through major soul-searching after this incident but was unable to determine who was responsible for the fact that the alarm signals from this patient were programmed only to go to one rather than two nurses’ pagers. However, that was irrelevant to the fact that the fired minority nurse committed a serious breach of duty by failing to respond to a series of alarms originating from a cardiac patient, legitimate non-discriminatory grounds for her employer to terminate her.
Thompson v. Health, 2017 WL 3927067 (Ill. App., September 5, 2017).Additional references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/telemetry.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/unnecessary-admission.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/cardiac-telemetry-nursing.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/cardiac-intensive-care-nursing.pdf