And of course, a lot of nurses are in the job for the human connection, and will consequently be burned out at an increasing rate.
To some degree this might actually be good long term, because it will be that much harder for hospitals to manipulate nurses into working around the limitations of the system to provide real care, which allows the administration to turn a blind eye to their own flaws. There's going to be a surge of malicious compliance that ends up shining a bright spotlight on just how abusive and dysfunctional hospital systems really are.
And patients will ultimately be the ones who suffer.
The nurse in that case was prosecuted for criminal reckless homicide (not malpractice, which is civil negligence.) The characterization of the hospitals direct responsibility is negligence not arising to criminal (gross) negligence (as the principal of respondeat superior doesn't apply in criminal law, the employees recklessness would not be imputed to the employer the way it would in a civil case.)
As for civil liability if the hospital, that was settled out of court with the victims family, the hospital did not get off scot free.
This... isn't a new thing that deserves the “now” label like it is a change. Criminal wrongdoing by employees (including in healthcare) very often does not rise to a level of criminality for the employer, and that's been true for a long time.
>This... isn't a new thing that deserves the “now” label like it is a change. Criminal wrongdoing by employees (including in healthcare) very often does not rise to a level of criminality for the employer, and that's been true for a long time.
Of course criminal charges for a patient death cannot be administered on an entity like an entire hospital, I didn't mean to insinuate that. But those who share responsibility for her actions: the administrators, doctors, morticians, everyone involved in designing the processes which led to this disaster and being involved in covering it up (i.e. the "hospital"), all seem at least partially liable if we are looking at this mistake through a criminal lens. Would you agree?
Some studies say that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US [1] - yet how often do we see "criminal reckless homicide" brought against nurses? There was an incredibly disingenuous serious of mistakes that had to happen for this nurse to mess up so badly, don't get me wrong. But when nurses are working 50-70 hours a week doing 14 hour shifts under extremely high pressure from management, these insane strings of mistakes are simply going to be an occurrence, and we shouldn't be using our tax dollars to pay for shitty lawyers to go after them for these mistakes. It's a waste of everybody's time, energy, and money, is detrimental to patients, and is a contributor to the fact that 90% of nurses are considering leaving the profession.
[1]https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/28/estimates-preventable-hospi...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
Strange to see that HN, which is generally suspicious of copaganda, falls for very transparent nursepaganda.
Absolutely. To each according to their authority.
RaDonda Vaught made a mistake, and admitted it, repeatedly, in multiple interviews.
But that mistake was only partly because of her free will. Vanderbilt University Medical Center incentivized her to make that choice, for their own profit, and with control over her employment.
RaDonda Vaught goes to prison.
VUMC pays a fine and nobody goes to prison.
I think HN takes a dim view of a company holding someone's contract in their hands, saying "Do something illegal or I tear this up," and then blaming the employee when everything explodes.
They're playing chicken with patients' lives, and passing off the charges to their employees when they lose.
When you have millions of drugs being issued, there will be some legitimate mistakes happening -- some will even cause death. If you want people to actual work in healthcare, they shouldn't be fearing for their lives for being less than perfect.
From what I've seen there's been a lot of reporting on her case, and how Vandy rightfully deserves a lot of pain, and a lot on how a subset of nurses feel she's been railroaded, but I've not seen what you claim and would like to know where I missed it.
I'll also re note that pharmacists have carried this burden for over a hundred years, and their removal from the process is part of how this chain of mistakes happened to begin with.
From the article:
"pursued penalties and criminal charges only against the nurse and not the hospital itself...Vanderbilt received no punishment for the fatal drug error...appears to support defense arguments that Vaught's fatal error was made possible by systemic failures at Vanderbilt."
That certainly seems to lay claim that there are more issues than the single nurse. Holding others accountable doesn't negate her culpability but it would prevent her from becoming a scapegoat.
From the article:
> Janie Harvey Garner, the founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group on Facebook with more than 600,000 members, worries the conviction will have a chilling effect on nurses disclosing their own errors or near errors, which could have a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care.
> "Health care just changed forever," she said after the verdict. "You can no longer trust people to tell the truth because they will be incriminating themselves."
That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. It satisfies the infantile urge to blame and shame a supposed evildoer, to the great detriment of everybody in the long run.
Bingo! I have a friend in the UK who organizes "post-mortem" (no pun intended) workshops and process training for hospital staff, precisely to do the NTSB-like thing after medical procedure errors occur. Rather than trying to point fingers and identify scapegoats, the central question is: "what went wrong here, and how do we reduce the chances of that happening again?"
Of course, occasionally the answer might be "We hired the wrong person, and we should fire them", but that seems to be only very rarely true.
> The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. Conferences are non-punitive and focus on the goal of improved patient care.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_confer...
When failures happen, it's usually the organization rather than the individual that's key to changing.
Do you believe that people who vote for "tough on crime" prosecutors are seeking harsh punishment of mistakes?
Or do they want criminals acting in malice to have the book thrown at them so other people aren't needless victims?
Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.
Well, I think your position is probably one of ignorance. Plenty of people I talk to are for tough prosecution on things like violent crime and against tough prosecution for simple drug possession.
> Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.
Yes, that does seem to be a trend. Prosecutorial discretion is actually important, but it doesn't mean you let crime run rampant, either.
I don't live in a jurisdiction that elect prosecutors, but is this actually a thing? Do candidates/incumbents run campaign ads on their conviction rate? Are voters researching/talking about the conviction rate of the candidates like it's a pissing contest?
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-franci...
> If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities.
> And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office.
> Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.
This was driven purely by the state prosecutor.
We don't allow plaintiffs to sue without standing. Why do we allow DAs to prosecute without a victim?
The state has a justification to pursue crime, but it seems like that should be limited when there's (no victim) or (victim who disagrees with prosecution).
In reality, the justice system is imperfect, inequal access to defense, imperfect identification of killers, etc.
All murder is bad.
But I'd certainly say murdering a good person is worse than murdering a bad one. And if a family, who on average has more incentive to think well of the victim than anyone, doesn't... should that be ignored?
And furthermore, perversely-incentivized blindness. Get a high conviction rate, by throwing the book at people charged with "PR bad" crimes, regardless of the individual, and as long as they aren't politically connected and potentially useful in your future political career.
Compared to that motivation of your average DA / USA, "How surviving family feels" doesn't seem worse.
Not sure that that is a good idea, justice is about more than just those immediately affected by a crime
If you are responsible for the death of another person due to your own negligence then you should be prosecuted for a crime and be removed from any scenario where you are able to repeat that mistake.
Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame. So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.
This was found to be by recklessness, which is beyond negligence but short of malice.
> We use the word "accident", but it's never really an accident.
Acts due to negligence, and even recklessness, really are accidents.
> Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame.
Surviving relatives don't make prosecutorial decisions, nor are they triers of fact in criminal cases.
> So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.
That...doesn't follow from what you’ve described, even taking everything preceding it as true.
I'm not sure this is true, specifically because the difference between a nonviolent traffic stop and a lethal (to the officer) traffic stop can be a split second.
If my keyboard had a 0.01% chance of lethally shocking me... I'm pretty sure that would alter my typing behavior.
The biggest cause for police death are traffic accidents.
Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident.
That is exactly what the nurse did, she failed to take proper care and someone died. The nice thing about the law is that what the relatives feel should not matter at all, that's why we are supposed to have impartial prosecutors that review the facts and determine if charges are warranted.
Bottom line, no matter the profession if you fail to take proper care and someone dies as a result, you should be prosecuted and prevented from getting the opportunity to do it again.
This is not true, because you're equivocating on the word "proper". An accident is failure to take proper care, where proper care means "care that follows the rules". Negligence is failure to take proper care, where "proper" means "can reasonably be expected". They are not the same thing.
[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/24/1088397...