Post-Operative Care: Hospital Had No Policy Or Procedure.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
May 2017
The Court accepts the patient’s family’s expert’s opinion that the hospital violated the standard of care by failing to have a policy, procedure or protocol for post-operative removal of a cardiac pacing wire by a nurse practitioner.
COURT OF APPEALS OF INDIANA April 5, 2017The patient was described as a previously active and functional eighty-two year-old who was recovering after open heart surgery to repair her mitral valve and bypass a blocked coronary artery. She was set to go home from the hospital on the fourth day after surgery. That morning, however, her surgeon forgot to remove the temporary heart pacing wire implanted during her surgery. A nurse practitioner decided to do it herself. She sat the patient in a recliner chair and pulled out the wire without any resistance to her pulling or sign of distress from the patient. However, minutes later the patient felt unwell and lost consciousness.
A code was called but unfortunately the patient was pronounced after an unsuccessful fifty-minute effort to resuscitate her. Over a liter of fluid was removed from her chest from a cardiac tamponade.
The Court of Appeals of Indiana allowed the family’s lawsuit against the hospital to go forward based on the expert opinion of a nurse practitioner that the hospital should have had a policy, procedure or protocol in effect to define how a nurse practitioner was to go about removing a pacer wire after open heart surgery. The Court pointed out the hospital could have argued but did not that the outcome would not necessarily have changed even if the nurse practitioner had followed such a policy.
Ford v. Indiana, 2017 WL 1244996 (Ind. App., April 5, 2017).More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/complications-postoperative-nursing-negligence.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/post-surgical-care-nurse-patient.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/post-surgical-infection.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/postop.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/post-operative-care-nurses-advocate-patient.pdf