Wasn’t there such a thing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?
~Max
You’re actually quoting the attorney, so maybe you should ask him.
Just pointing out that this is less straightforward than it might appear on the surface.
Brand names are just that… marketing inventions that are not stand-ins for the underlying drug. Brand names also change, while the name of the drug itself does not. Pharmacists might substitute a generic even when the prescription names a brand name (for cost/insurance coverage reasons).
So, the generic name is typically going to be your “primary key”.
And, you don’t want people dispensing brand name drugs if the patient’s insurance won’t cover it.
Yes, there are plenty of MDs who might want to enter or search by brand name, but this isn’t as obviously broken a system as it might seem.
Update:
A jury on Friday convicted a former Nashville nurse of reckless homicide and impaired adult abuse after she was accused of inadvertently injecting a patient with a deadly dose of a paralyzing drug.
I’m a nurse who’s administered lots of Versed and vecuronium, we use an automated dispense Bot, that sometimes acts hindkey. At a quick glance, I’d say the prosocuter would have a steep slope to climb to convince me that the mens rea for homicide could be prove beyound a reasonable doubt.
I’ll take a deep dive into the story, if people want
IANAL, but the Tennessee Reckless Homicide law appears to have a pretty low bar for mens rea:
Reckless Homicide in Tennessee is simply, the reckless killing of another and is a Class D Felony. It provides for a lower standard of mental culpability, or mens rea. Reckless is conduct whereby the actor does not desire harmful consequence but foresees (or should foresee) the possibility and consciously takes the risk.
Here is the TN jury instruction for reckless homicide:
There isn’t a mens rea for “homicide” , because there are different types of homicide and each requires a different mental state. For example, in my state “criminally negligent homicide” might just involve failing to perceive a risk that a reasonable person would have.
I would consider it to be more or less the equivalent to killing someone with your car while texting.
You didn’t mean to do so, but your reckless disregard for the safety of others lead to their death.
Exactly (bolding mine)
If they thought she knew she was injecting vecuronium they’d have charged her with more.
A lot hinges on her claim the the hospital had permitted or promoted safety overrides as a work around to the bugs after the software update. They’re unlikely to cop to it, I don’t find it implausible at all, based on how the hospitals that I’ve worked in behave.
Sure, they would have charged her with more if it was thought that she did it intentionally. But I have to ask, since you are a nurse, does the standard of care not require nurses to look at the vial at some point before the medication is administered , or to monitor the patient after administering the medication ? Those lapses have nothing to do with the cabinet and in fact , if the cabinet gets “hinky” that seems to make it even more necessary to make sure you are administering the correct drug.
As for
At a quick glance, I’d say the prosocuter would have a steep slope to climb to convince me that the mens rea for homicide could be prove beyound a reasonable doubt.
That might be true but post 24 (right above yours) has a link to an article reporting that she was in fact convicted of reckless homicide and impaired adult abuse , so apparently the jury felt the prosecutor did prove that she was reckless.
Also, @outlierrn : the second part of the jury instructions – where you bolded – shows another way that a person could be found guilty of reckless homicide.
It is not another requirement that must also be present. It’s either/or.
[Married to a MSN, FNP (a "Master’s-prepared Nurse Practitioner, for those not fluent with the alphabet soup)]
Yes. Does a nurse normally, when dispensing the proper medication, still have to scroll through a bunch of warnings?
And in any case, this is a mistake (a really bad, negligent one), not a criminal act. Crimes usually need intent. She should be sanctioned and sued, released of her certification and not allowed to serve in the field. To send her to prison is absurd.
Sure, but note that all important word there: Tennessee
I stand behind To send her to prison is absurd.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, it can be both.
IMHO, there should almost never be prison without criminal intent. Intent is the big thing.
This is promising to be a tangent, but I’ll offer one question:
A driver – under the influence of meth, Oxy, and alcohol – drives up onto a sidewalk, running over and killing a dozen people, five of whom are young children.
No intent evident.
?
He intended to take illegal drugs.
Quite commonly, the story of these negligence/recklessness cases is that the accused chose to be doing something other than the important task that should have commanded their attention.
But I’ll drop the threadjack here. Happy to join in if you want to start a new thread.
According to this
The neglect charge stemmed from allegations that Vaught did not properly monitor Murphey after she was injected with the wrong drug
She certainly intended to walk away from the patient after administering the medication , leaving her unmonitored. And from my own experiences with Versed and some reading I have done , that monitoring would have been required even if Versed had been the drug she administered.
Absolutely. Every drug, every time. But while ‘I looked at it, but I didn’t see it’ is a common human fuck up, it’s also kinda the definition of not doing something consciously, something you weren’t choosing to do.
Please understand I’m not defending this (ex)nurse.