ALT-3 What Nursing Students should know
Precious little time is devoted to the legal aspects of professional nursing. I remember only two or three lectures given on this important subject. Hopefully, nursing legality and liability has been expanded to give student nurses more information regarding the legal ramifications they will be facing on a daily basis as professional nurses.
Some of the reasons nurses end up in court include but are not limited to: poor charting, medication errors and disgruntled employees and/or families. Poor charting will get you into big trouble. Nurses are taught to chart defensively in order to protect their licenses and reputations. Always remember to protect yourself while protecting your license. No sloppy charting allowed.
Another big area of legal concern is medication errors. For example, a nurse adds a new IV bag to the patient's line, pre-mixed by the pharmacist. The patient dies twenty minutes later. The nurse is confident that he or she followed all correct procedures. However, two weeks later the nurse finds out that too much potassium was in the bag causing the death of the patient. The medication label on the IV bag was labeled incorrectly by the pharmacist who misread the physician's order. Unfortunately, the nurse is libel with the pharmacist because the nurse should have known that the IV bag contained too much potassium by reading the medication label on the bag, becoming suspicious of the dosage amount, immediately checking the physician's written order and thereby not hanging the bag.
Another example is a busy nurse reaching for the wrong heparin bottle for injection. Both bottles are heparin. Both are labeled with a blue label but one bottle contains 10,000 more units of heparin. A deadly mistake can be prevented by the nurse slowing down to read the label and the pharmaceutical company making one label blue and the more potent bottle label red.
These are extreme cases and are not meant to scare potential nursing students out of the nursing profession. But be aware, accidents and lawsuits happen. The good news is that malpractice insurance is fairly reasonable to purchase and many facilities include it in their benefits packages.
Finally, it's always wise to maintain a professional composure at all times while on duty. Unfortunately, con-artists exist in the world who know that nurses are usually heavily insured for malpractice. Protect yourself by always being aware of your surroundings. This will protect your license and good name. Don't allow a family member or visitor to assist you in any kind of procedure such as transporting a loved one out of bed or into a chair. Any number of bad scenarios could result causing heartache and pain. An employee may falsely accuse you of sexual harassment. Always be on guard and always keep it professionl to stay out of court.
