Nursing Negligence and Malpractices

What Constitutes Nursing Negligence?

In the last five years, the cases of nursing negligence and malpractices has risen to
an alarming rate. This is according to the National Council of State Boards of
Nursing. We as nurses should be concerned about this rate because as medical
professionals, malpractices in nursing and nurse negligence is very much taken into
consideration during our lecture discussions and clinicals back in nursing school.
The only difference is that working today as a licensed nurse will not give your
clinical instructor half the blame because in the fisrt place, youre on your own
already.

Nursing malpractice can be generally defined as negligence on the part of a Nurse

which causes physical or emotional damage to a patient or client under their care.
This includes failure to do appropriate nursing care at a certain time, surgical
assisting mistakes, mistakes in delivering of a child (for nurse midwives), mistakes
with medications, or causing any loss or injury by not performing professionally.
Nursing malpractice is limited to negligence which occurs in the course of medical
or health care, and the basic legal issues involved in medical malpractice are the
same as the legal elements in common neglect.

There are 4 elements of Nursing Malpractice:

Standards of Care:
This refers to the norms that experience and history implied as the "right thing to do
at the right time". In general, its what a reasonably prudent nurse would do in a
similar situation and given the same circumstance. An example would be a nurse
giving a patient oxygen therapy via face mask when she noticed the O2 saturation
was below normal level and there was a doctor's order for such actions to be done.

Nursing Care Plans help nurses define the most commonly encountered clinical
problems and its symptoms, then offer guidelines for performing ongoing
assessment and therapeutic interventions. Care Plans assist the nurse in the
development, deliverance, and documentation of patient care in order to help
nurses adhere to the most current practice and professional standards in nursing.

Some nursing malpractice mistakes might be the following:

* Failure to secure an informed consent from a patient prior to a surgical procedure

* Misuse of a medical equipment
* Medication error
* Documentation error
* Failing to perform necessary procedure
The best defense that a nurse could ever have is the patient's chart. Remember the
old nursing cliche that goes like "If you didnt chart it, you didnt do it"? This might
well be your life saver from a nursing legal lawyer or attorney. So always remember
to chart completely.

Duty:
By accepting the endorsement or referral of a patient from the ER or any other
nursing department, the nurse is duty-bound to care for the patient with his or her
utmost ability, knowledge and skills. That is pretty well covered in the Good
Samaritan law.

Legal Causation:
It is the second major hurdle that must be overcome for a successful malpractice
plaintiff. The plaintiff must
establish that had standards of care been follow, the injury or damages to the
patient would have been avoided. A legal cause of action for nursing negligence
usually exists when it is determined that the breach of the standard of care
proximately caused damages, usually physical or emotional in nature to the victim.

And lastly,

Damages:
This is the result of the substantial neglect or malpractice on the part of the nurse.
Patient's lawyers and legal consultation attorneys would capitalize on this element
so their clients can get a well deserved settlement claim. This includes: death,
disability, prolonged pain, deformity, or added cost of hospital stay.

Source: http://NursingNegligence.blogspot.com