Throughout the healthcare system professionals all held liable for their work they perform. Nurses are an essential part to the healthcare system throughout clinics and hospitals around the world. While they are not the head of the healthcare world, nurses receive patients histories, prepare patients for treatments and surgeries as well as care after, nurses help in the initial diagnosis, provide counseling for different medical issues, and so much more. With nurses being involved in so many aspects of patient care nurses can be held liable for patient injuries if they were caused by the failure of performance from the nurses’ daily duties. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, nursing malpractice negligence means, “The doing …show more content…
Nurses are the last step of the train to check medications, going downstream from the physicians’ orders, the pharmacist filling the order, sending it up to the nurse to administer it to the patient. There are ways set into place to ensure that the correct dosage is delivered to the patient and to make sure the nurse is giving the right amount of medication and putting their patient in harm’s way. Many hospitals today use the Five Rights of Medication Administration, the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route, and the right time. According the Vice President of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, “They are merely broadly stated goals, or desired outcomes, of safe medication practices that offer no procedural guidance on how to achieve these goals. Thus, simply holding healthcare practitioners accountable for giving the right drug to the right patient in the right dose by the right route at the right time fails miserably to ensure medication safety.” (2007). When nurses find their way into a negligence case for wrongly administering medications, it can be used against them in the situation for the failure to use the five rights. Though it is through the organization that the nurse works for of which the nurse has to follow the …show more content…
This is because there is a large number of specialty care practices which include operating rooms, intensive care, coronary care, and medical-surgical units. The amount the nurses are held liable raises as throughout many acute care facilities there are more patients who are sicker requiring more interventions with conditions that can change in a minute. This can lead to nurses having to work quickly and under a great deal of patient to keep their patient alive. If a nurse fails to use the equipment around them safely, beyond their known knowledge, and against their limits it can be hazardous to the patient and they can find themselves in liable. If nurses do not follow the manufacturer’s usage and try to use the equipment differently, leading to injuring or death is case for negligence. A way to avoid this is for organizations to hold classes about new equipment as well as refreshers to not case more harm than good with nurses who are unfamiliar with the