Telephone Triage: Nurse Partly To Blame For Delayed Treatment.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
June 2016
The clinic’s telephone triage nurse failed to run through the whole list of potential symptoms drawn up for telephone screening of possible flu cases.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT ALASKA May 4, 2016During the H1N1 influenza crisis a rural community health center developed measures to keep persons infected with the flu from entering the clinic premises and potentially infecting other patients and clinic staff. Those measures included signs posted conspicuously at clinic entrances telling the public in no uncertain terms that if they had certain symptoms they absolutely were not to enter the clinic but instead were to go home and call a specific phone number.
When the public phoned the number they spoke with a nurse. The nurses had been given a list of symptoms to ask about to determine if the caller just had the flu and could stay home and self-care, or had something more serious like pneumonia for which a trip to a hospital emergency department had to be advised.
The US District Court for the District of Alaska ruled a clinic nurse and the patient were each fifty percent to blame for the patient who had pneumonia not getting to an emergency room sooner. By the time the patient got to a hospital she was so sick she had to be airlifted from the rural hospital to a regional medical facility. The nurse did not go through the whole list of possible symptoms that the physicians had drawn up for telephone screening of cases that looked like the flu. Specifically the nurse did not ask about chest pain or shortness of breath or advise the patient those symptoms could be more serious than the flu and she needed to come to the hospital.
Pallas v. US, 2016 WL 2347830 (D. Alaska, May 4, 2016).More from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/phonenurse.htm