No one is born a great doctor or a great nurse. They have to attend school, study, and spend many, many hours learning practical knowledge through actual experience. We expect that they will make mistakes along the way. We also expect, however, that they will be carefully supervised and their work will be reviewed by a capable, experienced doctor or nurse. This way they can learn while their mistakes are rectified so that patients are not harmed.
The doctors and nurses who are still in training need to understand the limits of their knowledge and ability. Those supervising them need to also understand the skills doctors and nurses in training have mastered and the limits of what are able to do on their own. Otherwise, even a single mistake that is not caught by the supervising doctor or nurse can lead to tragic results.
Recently a case was reported in which a pregnant woman went to the hospital with complaints of nausea and vomiting. She was almost at full term. While at the hospital the woman was monitored by a nurse trainee. The nurse trainee, rather than a registered nurse or a doctor, read the strips from the fetal heart rate monitor. The strip showed that the woman’s unborn baby was in severe fetal distress but the nurse trainee misread the strip as normal. The woman was sent home without knowing that her baby was suffering from a lack of oxygen.
Three days later the baby was delivered as scheduled. She had suffered severe brain injury and developed cerebral palsy. The little girl spent the following four years of her life enduring seizures, undergoing therapy and having to be fed through a feeding tube as she could not eat on her own, before dying due to complications from her cerebral palsy. She was survived by her parents and 11 and 16 year old brothers. The law firm that represented the parents was able to report that they took the case to trial and achieved a verdict on behalf of the parents in the amount of $4,400,000.
This case illustrates what can happen when a doctor or nurse who is still in training is allowed to make decisions on their own before they have fully mastered the necessary skills. True, even experienced doctors and nurses sometimes misread a fetal heart rate strip. But while an experienced labor and delivery nurse has interpreted hundreds or thousands of the strips a nurse trainee has only read a few and is much more likely to make an error. When the error is not caught, as in this case, the result can be devastating and lead to a malpractice claim.
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney focused on complex injury cases, including birth injury medical malpractice cases. To learn more about fetal distress cases visit his website at www.birth-injury-malpractice-law.com.
