There are more Medical Malpractice Suits today than ten years ago. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank, operated by the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services medical malpractice payments on behalf of nurses nearly doubled from 307 in 1997 to 586 in 2005. A simple action of buying a phone recording device will help you be protected. Rita Kae Restrepo, RN, BS, CPAN, a legal nurse consultant and post-anesthesia care unit nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, said that more and more nurses are being sued individually.
The lawsuits bring about nurses losing their jobs, licenses and even their personal assets. Common mistakes like simply following a physician’s orders will not exempt you from a lawsuit. A good example for this is when a physician will order you to just monitor a patient’s condition. When you notice that something should be done because the patient needs help, document your conversation with the doctor use your phone recording device. Record your request that he should come and observe the patient himself so that he can advise on additional treatment or medication. Going an extra mile for your patient by consulting with your supervisor about your patient or even consulting other doctors will probably save the life of the patient as well as your way of life.
Documentation
According to lawyers lawsuits come in when nurses who believed they had fulfilled their responsibilities because they called a physician and got an
inappropriate order to simply continue watching the patient. "They were not using their critical-thinking skills," said Rita Kae Restrepo, RN, BS, CPAN. In Kevin Giordano’s, a partner at the law firm of Keyes and Donnellan, P.C. in Springfield Mass, research, he said that negligent monitoring cases arise from a nurse’s failure to perform an assessment and notify the treating physician of changes. A nurse’s failure to obtain vital signs and report a patient’s deteriorating condition was held to constitute negligence. Following your company’s policy on hospital care for patients will already be a good guideline for you to follow to protect you from malpractice suits.
However, if you blindly follow or carry out orders of the physician that will not stop you from being named as one of the defendants in a case, your critical judgment is needed. There had been cases where nurses had been sued but could not defend themselves because of lack of documentations. Making notes on the patients chart is one of the ways to document your concerns and findings. If for example you have consulted your supervisor about the care of the patient you should document it. Using your phone recording device in calling your supervisor for your consultation is a great way to document. Repeatedly calling the physician and recording is also a great way to document.
Constantly giving the physician updates might irritate him but will protect you from malpractice suits. The phone recording device is a handy tool because you can record additional files into it without destroying the original. It is small enough to fit into your pocket and easy to use. When your shift ends it is easy for you to download it to your PC and if you want you can even convert it to wav files. The issues on most malpractice cases are not about who has the responsibility of the patient but in the healthcare that had been provided for him. Did you perform your duty to the best of your ability? In the end it will not be a question of should you do this to prevent being sued but it should be "I give the patient my best possible care because it is the right thing to do."
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