12 ms·

And, alas, found guilty: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902487/former-nurse-found-guilty-in-accidental-injection-death-of-75-year-old

by Wistar 4y ago

And, alas, found guilty: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902487/former-nurse-found-guilty-in-accidental-injection-death-of-75-year-old-patient https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...

aiisjustanif 4y ago
Jfc that is terrible.
- rectang 4y ago
  But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors. Their incentives are all towards maxing out the savagery towards defendants, systemic repercussions be damned. From the article: > Janie Harvey Garner, the founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group on Facebook with more than 600,000 members, worries the conviction will have a chilling effect on nurses disclosing their own errors or near errors, which could have a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care. > "Health care just changed forever," she said after the verdict. "You can no longer trust people to tell the truth because they will be incriminating themselves." That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. It satisfies the infantile urge to blame and shame a supposed evildoer, to the great detriment of everybody in the long run.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. Bingo! I have a friend in the UK who organizes "post-mortem" (no pun intended) workshops and process training for hospital staff, precisely to do the NTSB-like thing after medical procedure errors occur. Rather than trying to point fingers and identify scapegoats, the central question is: "what went wrong here, and how do we reduce the chances of that happening again?" Of course, occasionally the answer might be "We hired the wrong person, and we should fire them", but that seems to be only very rarely true.
    - evil-olive 4y ago
      this is fairly common in the medical field, the usual name for it is "morbidity and mortality" [0] > The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. Conferences are non-punitive and focus on the goal of improved patient care. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_confer...
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      An an organizational ethos, it's hard to argue with a default of "We fail, you succeed." When failures happen, it's usually the organization rather than the individual that's key to changing.
  - dolni 4y ago
    > But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors. Do you believe that people who vote for "tough on crime" prosecutors are seeking harsh punishment of mistakes? Or do they want criminals acting in malice to have the book thrown at them so other people aren't needless victims?
    - rectang 4y ago
      I don't think "tough on crime" voters strongly differentiate, based on the behaviors of the prosecutors themselves. The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains). Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.
      - gruez 4y ago
        > The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains). I don't live in a jurisdiction that elect prosecutors, but is this actually a thing? Do candidates/incumbents run campaign ads on their conviction rate? Are voters researching/talking about the conviction rate of the candidates like it's a pissing contest?
        rectang 4y ago
        Yes. It was true for our current US Vice President, Kamala Harris for example — but she's not an outlier, this happens all the time. https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/ https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-franci... > If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities. > And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office. > Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Worse, the family of the victim had apparently forgiven the nurse for her mistake and didn't want criminal prosecution. This was driven purely by the state prosecutor.
  - graywh 4y ago
    it was the county DA and he's up for reelection this year
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Do we really want to live in a society where people are not prosecuted because the family of the victim forgave them? So if two people commit the same offence, Person A is not prosecuted because the victim's family forgave him but Person B is because the victims family did not? Was offender B just unlucky on victim selection? The rule and application of law should not be based on the feelings of the victims family. Did the dead person forgive them?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      We certainly don't want to ignore them, given they have the most immediate understanding of the situation and entitlement to guilt. We don't allow plaintiffs to sue without standing. Why do we allow DAs to prosecute without a victim? The state has a justification to pursue crime, but it seems like that should be limited when there's (no victim) or (victim who disagrees with prosecution).
      - wonderwonder 4y ago
        Is the dead person not a victim? If someone is murdered and their family is like good I hated them anyway does that nullify the existence of a crime? Are we basing prosecution now on the character of the victim? That's a pretty quick path to deciding that certain victims have no value in society.
        ethbr0 4y ago
        The dead person is a victim, and in a perfect society we'd just execute the killer. 1:1. In reality, the justice system is imperfect, inequal access to defense, imperfect identification of killers, etc. All murder is bad. But I'd certainly say murdering a good person is worse than murdering a bad one. And if a family, who on average has more incentive to think well of the victim than anyone, doesn't... should that be ignored?
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Is it though? Should a cop be prosecuted for accidentally killing an innocent civilian in the course of duty during a non violent traffic stop? I would argue that they should be. How many chances should a nurse get to accidentally kill someone? Do they only get prosecuted the second time? Third? If you are responsible for the death of another person due to your own negligence then you should be prosecuted for a crime and be removed from any scenario where you are able to repeat that mistake.
  - Jiro 4y ago
    A cop killing an innocent civilian at a nonviolent traffic stop can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence. We use the word "accident", but it's never really an accident. If a nurse accidentally kills someone, it may really be an accident. Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame. So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      "can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence" Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident. That is exactly what the nurse did, she failed to take proper care and someone died. The nice thing about the law is that what the relatives feel should not matter at all, that's why we are supposed to have impartial prosecutors that review the facts and determine if charges are warranted. Bottom line, no matter the profession if you fail to take proper care and someone dies as a result, you should be prosecuted and prevented from getting the opportunity to do it again.
      - Jiro 4y ago
        >Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident. This is not true, because you're equivocating on the word "proper". An accident is failure to take proper care, where proper care means "care that follows the rules". Negligence is failure to take proper care, where "proper" means "can reasonably be expected". They are not the same thing.
HarryHirsch 4y ago
The solution isn't that Radonda Vought, who killed a patient through a string of crassly negligent actions should walk free - one would like to see the whole chain of command be given serious prison time. It's clear that patient safety at Vanderbilt isn't a priority - training and safety culture reflects that. Strange to see that HN, which is generally suspicious of copaganda, falls for very transparent nursepaganda.
- ikiris 4y ago
  Its the strong libertarian vibe. They think consequences shouldn't exist, and the dead guy can take his money elsewhere.
  - LanceH 4y ago
    The strong libertarian vibe of npr saying she's being scapegoated? When you have millions of drugs being issued, there will be some legitimate mistakes happening -- some will even cause death. If you want people to actual work in healthcare, they shouldn't be fearing for their lives for being less than perfect.
    - ikiris 4y ago
      please cite where an npr report gives the impression she's been scapegoated in such a way that she doesn't deserve the consequences she's been given. I'd love to read it honestly. From what I've seen there's been a lot of reporting on her case, and how Vandy rightfully deserves a lot of pain, and a lot on how a subset of nurses feel she's been railroaded, but I've not seen what you claim and would like to know where I missed it. I'll also re note that pharmacists have carried this burden for over a hundred years, and their removal from the process is part of how this chain of mistakes happened to begin with.
      - bumby 4y ago
        "she doesn't deserve the consequences" is different than scapegoating. Scapegoating means she's the sole person being blamed for the failures of a larger group. From the article: "pursued penalties and criminal charges only against the nurse and not the hospital itself...Vanderbilt received no punishment for the fatal drug error...appears to support defense arguments that Vaught's fatal error was made possible by systemic failures at Vanderbilt." That certainly seems to lay claim that there are more issues than the single nurse. Holding others accountable doesn't negate her culpability but it would prevent her from becoming a scapegoat.
gruez 4y ago
Discussed on HN with counter-argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778376
bluedays 4y ago
Jesus Christ. As someone who use to give out meds this is such an easy mistake to make that it's crazy that this is now criminal.

by Wistar 4y ago

aiisjustanif 4y ago

Jfc that is terrible.

rectang 4y ago
But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors. Their incentives are all towards maxing out the savagery towards defendants, systemic repercussions be damned. From the article: > Janie Harvey Garner, the founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group on Facebook with more than 600,000 members, worries the conviction will have a chilling effect on nurses disclosing their own errors or near errors, which could have a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care. > "Health care just changed forever," she said after the verdict. "You can no longer trust people to tell the truth because they will be incriminating themselves." That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. It satisfies the infantile urge to blame and shame a supposed evildoer, to the great detriment of everybody in the long run.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. Bingo! I have a friend in the UK who organizes "post-mortem" (no pun intended) workshops and process training for hospital staff, precisely to do the NTSB-like thing after medical procedure errors occur. Rather than trying to point fingers and identify scapegoats, the central question is: "what went wrong here, and how do we reduce the chances of that happening again?" Of course, occasionally the answer might be "We hired the wrong person, and we should fire them", but that seems to be only very rarely true.
  - evil-olive 4y ago
    this is fairly common in the medical field, the usual name for it is "morbidity and mortality" [0] > The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. Conferences are non-punitive and focus on the goal of improved patient care. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_confer...
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    An an organizational ethos, it's hard to argue with a default of "We fail, you succeed." When failures happen, it's usually the organization rather than the individual that's key to changing.
- dolni 4y ago
  > But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors. Do you believe that people who vote for "tough on crime" prosecutors are seeking harsh punishment of mistakes? Or do they want criminals acting in malice to have the book thrown at them so other people aren't needless victims?
  - rectang 4y ago
    I don't think "tough on crime" voters strongly differentiate, based on the behaviors of the prosecutors themselves. The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains). Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.
    - gruez 4y ago
      > The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains). I don't live in a jurisdiction that elect prosecutors, but is this actually a thing? Do candidates/incumbents run campaign ads on their conviction rate? Are voters researching/talking about the conviction rate of the candidates like it's a pissing contest?
      - rectang 4y ago
        Yes. It was true for our current US Vice President, Kamala Harris for example — but she's not an outlier, this happens all the time. https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-francisco-district-attorney-crime/ https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-franci... > If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities. > And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office. > Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
anonporridge 4y ago
Worse, the family of the victim had apparently forgiven the nurse for her mistake and didn't want criminal prosecution. This was driven purely by the state prosecutor.
- graywh 4y ago
  it was the county DA and he's up for reelection this year
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Do we really want to live in a society where people are not prosecuted because the family of the victim forgave them? So if two people commit the same offence, Person A is not prosecuted because the victim's family forgave him but Person B is because the victims family did not? Was offender B just unlucky on victim selection? The rule and application of law should not be based on the feelings of the victims family. Did the dead person forgive them?
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    We certainly don't want to ignore them, given they have the most immediate understanding of the situation and entitlement to guilt. We don't allow plaintiffs to sue without standing. Why do we allow DAs to prosecute without a victim? The state has a justification to pursue crime, but it seems like that should be limited when there's (no victim) or (victim who disagrees with prosecution).
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      Is the dead person not a victim? If someone is murdered and their family is like good I hated them anyway does that nullify the existence of a crime? Are we basing prosecution now on the character of the victim? That's a pretty quick path to deciding that certain victims have no value in society.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        The dead person is a victim, and in a perfect society we'd just execute the killer. 1:1. In reality, the justice system is imperfect, inequal access to defense, imperfect identification of killers, etc. All murder is bad. But I'd certainly say murdering a good person is worse than murdering a bad one. And if a family, who on average has more incentive to think well of the victim than anyone, doesn't... should that be ignored?
wonderwonder 4y ago
Is it though? Should a cop be prosecuted for accidentally killing an innocent civilian in the course of duty during a non violent traffic stop? I would argue that they should be. How many chances should a nurse get to accidentally kill someone? Do they only get prosecuted the second time? Third? If you are responsible for the death of another person due to your own negligence then you should be prosecuted for a crime and be removed from any scenario where you are able to repeat that mistake.
- Jiro 4y ago
  A cop killing an innocent civilian at a nonviolent traffic stop can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence. We use the word "accident", but it's never really an accident. If a nurse accidentally kills someone, it may really be an accident. Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame. So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    "can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence" Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident. That is exactly what the nurse did, she failed to take proper care and someone died. The nice thing about the law is that what the relatives feel should not matter at all, that's why we are supposed to have impartial prosecutors that review the facts and determine if charges are warranted. Bottom line, no matter the profession if you fail to take proper care and someone dies as a result, you should be prosecuted and prevented from getting the opportunity to do it again.
    - Jiro 4y ago
      >Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident. This is not true, because you're equivocating on the word "proper". An accident is failure to take proper care, where proper care means "care that follows the rules". Negligence is failure to take proper care, where "proper" means "can reasonably be expected". They are not the same thing.

HarryHirsch 4y ago

The solution isn't that Radonda Vought, who killed a patient through a string of crassly negligent actions should walk free - one would like to see the whole chain of command be given serious prison time. It's clear that patient safety at Vanderbilt isn't a priority - training and safety culture reflects that. Strange to see that HN, which is generally suspicious of copaganda, falls for very transparent nursepaganda.

ikiris 4y ago
Its the strong libertarian vibe. They think consequences shouldn't exist, and the dead guy can take his money elsewhere.
- LanceH 4y ago
  The strong libertarian vibe of npr saying she's being scapegoated? When you have millions of drugs being issued, there will be some legitimate mistakes happening -- some will even cause death. If you want people to actual work in healthcare, they shouldn't be fearing for their lives for being less than perfect.
  - ikiris 4y ago
    please cite where an npr report gives the impression she's been scapegoated in such a way that she doesn't deserve the consequences she's been given. I'd love to read it honestly. From what I've seen there's been a lot of reporting on her case, and how Vandy rightfully deserves a lot of pain, and a lot on how a subset of nurses feel she's been railroaded, but I've not seen what you claim and would like to know where I missed it. I'll also re note that pharmacists have carried this burden for over a hundred years, and their removal from the process is part of how this chain of mistakes happened to begin with.
    - bumby 4y ago
      "she doesn't deserve the consequences" is different than scapegoating. Scapegoating means she's the sole person being blamed for the failures of a larger group. From the article: "pursued penalties and criminal charges only against the nurse and not the hospital itself...Vanderbilt received no punishment for the fatal drug error...appears to support defense arguments that Vaught's fatal error was made possible by systemic failures at Vanderbilt." That certainly seems to lay claim that there are more issues than the single nurse. Holding others accountable doesn't negate her culpability but it would prevent her from becoming a scapegoat.

gruez 4y ago

Discussed on HN with counter-argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778376

bluedays 4y ago

Jesus Christ. As someone who use to give out meds this is such an easy mistake to make that it's crazy that this is now criminal.