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My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be w

My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be working in the profession, that seems clear. In jail, I don't know. Is there such a thing as "criminally incompetent"?

smolder 5y ago
If you deceive people into giving you responsibilities you're incapable of dealing with, and it brings meaningful harm to others, it can be criminal. There are regulations for legal, medical, and financial services to criminalize that deceit and prevent that kind of situation.
phaedrus 5y ago
Why is the nurse criminally negligent, but not the company or programmers which made the software that runs the automated medicine cabinet? Or the hospital administration who failed to recognize and do something to correct the systemic problem of why constant "overrides" are needed to complete normal tasks? Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known). I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.
- bigDinosaur 5y ago
  You are correct. Robert Wachter has written a lot on this (see his The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age) and it's a common error to simply blame someone like a nurse for administering the incorrect medicine as opposed to seeing how that situation came to be. Healthcare has a lot to learn from how similar things are investigated in the aviation industry (note: that doesn't mean nurses get absolved of everything, just that even apparently insanely stupid mistakes are often the result of swiss-cheese style errors).

smolder 5y ago

If you deceive people into giving you responsibilities you're incapable of dealing with, and it brings meaningful harm to others, it can be criminal. There are regulations for legal, medical, and financial services to criminalize that deceit and prevent that kind of situation.

phaedrus 5y ago

Why is the nurse criminally negligent, but not the company or programmers which made the software that runs the automated medicine cabinet? Or the hospital administration who failed to recognize and do something to correct the systemic problem of why constant "overrides" are needed to complete normal tasks? Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known). I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.

bigDinosaur 5y ago
You are correct. Robert Wachter has written a lot on this (see his The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age) and it's a common error to simply blame someone like a nurse for administering the incorrect medicine as opposed to seeing how that situation came to be. Healthcare has a lot to learn from how similar things are investigated in the aviation industry (note: that doesn't mean nurses get absolved of everything, just that even apparently insanely stupid mistakes are often the result of swiss-cheese style errors).