Nursing Negligence

In 2016, a 41-year-old man named Jose Polanco was admitted to Elmhurst Hospital after suffering a heart attack. Unexpectedly, he began to develop pneumonia during his recovery and soon suffered from a serious infection that saw him become an inpatient for four months.

As his condition worsened, Jose’s infection began to affect his blood pressure, and doctors ordered that a line be inserted in his arm to provide ongoing monitoring. Unfortunately, Jose’s arm soon turned back after having the line inserted, and he was diagnosed with gangrene shortly after.

Apparently, Jose developed two wounds in the area of his bicep. It is believed that these areas did not receive enough oxygen after the line was inserted by a nurse, which caused a lack of blood flow to the area and the tissues to die. This necrotic tissue then caused gangrene.

On November 18, 2013, famous actor Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberley Quaid welcomed their twins into the world via surrogacy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Unfortunately, the twins were premature and had to stay in the hospital for treatment because they had both acquired staph infections.

Quaid called the hospital around 21:00 that night to check after the twins. The nurse who took the call told him that “they’re just fine.” What Quaid didn’t know was that nurses had noticed blood oozing from the intravenous site on the arm of one of the twins and a spot on her heel. It turns out that the nurses had mistakenly given the twins 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin but hadn’t told Quaid of that when he called. Hospital staff scrambled to reverse the effects of the heparin throughout the night but still failed to notify Quaid or his wife of the situation.

In the summer of 2018, six patients at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, developed a rare infection after they received injectable opioids diluted with tap water. This resulted in the patients developing bloodstream infections with Sphingomonas paucimobilis. 

Thankfully, all of the patients were treated with antibiotics and no deaths resulted from the infections, though some patients later died from causes related to their cancer. However, the question still remained: how did a bacterium, which naturally lives in soil and water, find its way into the bloodstreams of these patients?

A startling trend of nursing home neglect has begun to emerge in recent years. Even worse, cases of nursing home neglect have been shown to be treated far less severely than the neglect of children and even that of animals. It has been revealed that the number of nursing home deaths and injuries caused by neglect or abuse is severely underreported.

Some of the harrowing statistics of nursing home neglect include:

According to a new report published in the Mail Online on 2 July 2019, a recent study of more than 1,000 nurses in the US found that the incidence of nursing negligence and medical errors has increased in recent years. The study indicated that this is largely due to exhausted nurses and nurse burnout. 

Statistical analysis of the study’s results revealed the following:

Nurse burnout is a physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion experienced by nurses which negatively affects patient outcomes and leads to job dissatisfaction. The number of nursing negligence lawsuits has increased due to nurse burnout, which is largely caused by organizational factors.

Nursing negligence is an unfortunate and often unavoidable consequence of nurse burnout. Stress, long working hours, infrequent breaks, and rotating shifts slow down reaction times, increases errors, and reduces motivation. All of these factors affect patient care.

Nursing negligence is a type of medical malpractice whereby a nurse, who is fully capable of providing quality nursing services, does not care for you the way a reasonable nurse would. The result of this is unnecessary suffering on your behalf.

Types of Nursing Negligence

There are five major types of nursing negligences that can occur: