Hospital Policy Violated: Nurse Guilty Of Negligence.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
February 2017
The Court agrees with the family of the deceased that a hospital has a legal duty to maintain a correct on-call list and an effective on-call procedure.
CALIFORNIA COURT OF APPEAL January 19, 2017A late-night gunshot victim arrived by ambulance in the emergency department. The emergency physician told the unit secretary to contact the on-call service to get a vascular surgeon to the hospital. After no response came in for half an hour from either of the vascular surgeons believed to be on call, the unit secretary asked the hospital operator to call the surgeons at home. One called en route to say he was stuck in traffic.
Surgery was started four hours after the patient arrived. He arrested during surgery and died.
The California Court of Appeal dismissed the family’s lawsuit. The emergency room nurse monitored the patient closely, kept taking his vital signs and repeatedly reported his life-threatening bleeding to the emergency physician. She obtained and gave the blood products the emergency physician ordered. As to her duty to advocate up the chain of command, the emergency room nurse thought that the proper step had been taken of calling in a vascular surgeon and there was nothing further she could do.
The Court agreed in general terms that a hospital has a duty to its patients to maintain a correct on-call list and effective on-call procedures for specialist physicians needed by its patients. However, in this case the Court ruled the family’s medical and nursing experts were unfamiliar with the hospital’s system and were unqualified to give expert opinions on the subject of hospital on-call procedures.
Ramirez v. Hospital, 2017 WL 218907 (Cal. App., January 19, 2017).More from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/oncall.htm