HOW LONG HAS
OUR NEWSLETTER BEEN PUBLISHED?
Our Print Edition has been published every month since October
1992. Digital publishing was added in 2002.
WHAT
IS OUR MISSION?
Our
mission is to reduce nurses' fear of the law and to minimize nurses'
exposure to litigation.
Nurse managers need to spot potential legal problems and prevent them
before they happen. Managers
and clinical nurses need to be familiar with how the law is applied by
the courts to specific patient-care situations, so that they can act
with confidence.
We
work toward our goals every month by highlighting the very latest
important Federal and state court decisions and new Federal regulations
directly affecting nurses in hospitals, long term care facilities and
home health agencies. We
focus on nursing negligence and nurses' employment and licensing issues.
Our
readers are professionals in nursing management, nursing education,
clinical nursing, healthcare risk management, legal nurse consulting and
law.
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Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing ProfessionPO Box 1342 Sedona AZ 86339-1342(206) 718-0861 subscriptions@nursinglaw.com
Nurses are not held to a different standard than employees in other occupations. That is, a nurse cannot be terminated for cause unless there has been willful misconduct or intentional disregard of the employer's interests. Nurses sometimes commit medication errors. Medication errors always have a potential to harm patients and sometimes do harm the patient. When a nurse commits a truly inadvertent mistake in administering medications there are no grounds to find willful misconduct. The archaic terminology of the common law is still relevant today in defining when there is willful misconduct justifying an employee's termination. Inadvertence is willful misconduct only if it is of such a degree as to manifest culpability, wrongful intent, or evil design, or show and intentional and substantial disregard of the employer's interests or of the employee's duties and obligations toward the employer. Scope Of Practice: Discipline For Nurse Who Refused To Follow Physician's Order. The scope of practice of a registered nurse does not include the authority unilaterally to decline to follow a physician's order. When a registered nurse has concerns about a physician's order, the nurse should try as soon as possible to contact the physician who gave the order to discuss the nurse'concerns. Failure to follow the treating physician's medication order and failure to attempt to contact the treating physician placed this nurse's patient at an unreasonable risk of harm. Although the patient in this case suffered no actual harm from missing her medication, the patient could have suffered significant harm including death as a result of the nurse's actions. A nurse has a legal duty to communicate significant changes in the patient's condition to the physician. In this case that meant that the nurse had to communicate to the physician who wrote the order for the enoxaparin that she was not giving it due to her concerns over complications. IM Injections: Hospital Used Outdated Nursing Standard. The hospital's protocol was last updated two and one-half years before. Based on the fifth edition of a standard nursing text which did not specify a maximum volume for injections into the deltoid muscle, the hospital's protocol specified a maximum volume of 5 ml for injections into the deltoid. However, the seventh edition of that same nursing text and other nursing texts current when the patient was treated limited injections into the deltoid to 0.5 to 1 ml. Larger volume injections were to be given in a larger muscle in the ventrogluteal region. The Court of Appeals of Texas accepted the patient's nursing expert's opinion that the hospital's protocol for intramuscular injections violated the legal standard of care, in that the protocol was based on an outdated nursing text. False Imprisonment: Nurse Tried To Hold Patient Against His Will - Patient Can Sue Hospital. The law on involuntary mental health holds must be followed to the letter at the risk of the patient filing a civil false imprisonment lawsuit. A suit for false imprisonment can be filed and won even if the victim has not sustained any actual monetary loss. Citizens in our society have rights and can sue for even a momentary restraint on their liberty which is not carried out under valid legal processes. However, if a person is restrained under a valid exercise of legal authority that is later overturned, the person has no right to sue. The Appellate Court of Illinois ruled that if a physician's certification is too old, the patient must be seen and a fresh certification must be prepared. State law must be followed to the letter when a citizen's liberty is at stake, and if not, the citizen can sue for false imprisonment. |
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