Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession (6)9 Sep 98
Quick Summary: One of the evaluating doctors made a written recommendation the patient was not to have guns around after his release.
This recommendation was not communicated to the patient’s wife when the patient was released. The deceased wife’s family can sue. COURT OF CIVIL APPEALS OF OKLAHOMA, 1998.
The Court of Civil Appeals of Oklahoma recently reiterated the rule that a state psychiatric facility has a responsibility to foreseeable victims of a patient’s known violent propensities not to release the patient prematurely.
In this case the patient shot and killed his wife and children, then shot himself, four days after being released prematurely from a state psychiatric facility.
The court ruled that there is a further legal duty to communicate to the family the evaluating physician’s recommendation that there not be guns in the house, if such a recommendation is entered in the chart. Shepard v. State Department of Mental Health, 957 P. 2d 553 (Okla. Civ. App., 1998).