Murphey's care alone required at least 20 cabinet overrides in just three days, Vaught said. While testifying before the nursing board last year, foreshadowing her defense in the upcoming trial, Vaught said that at the time of Murphey's death, Vanderbilt was instructing nurses to use overrides to overcome cabinet delays and constant technical problems caused by an ongoing overhaul of the hospital's electronic health records system. This time, the cabinet offered vecuronium. When the cabinet did not produce Versed, Vaught triggered an override that unlocked a much larger swath of medications, then searched for 'VE' again. According to documents filed in the case, Vaught initially tried to withdraw Versed from a cabinet by typing 'VE' into its search function without realizing she should have been looking for its generic name, midazolam. The case hinges on the nurse's use of an electronic medication cabinet, a computerized device that dispenses a range of drugs. Prosecutors will say she ignored a cascade of warnings that led to the deadly error. I could be RaDonda.'Īs the trial begins, Nashville prosecutors will argue that Vaught's error was anything but a common mistake any nurse could make. And the second kind are the ones who know this could happen, any day, no matter how careful they are. 'You have the nurses who assume they would never make a mistake like that, and usually it's because they don't realize they could. 'In response to a story like this one, there are two kinds of nurses,' Garner said. Garner said she once switched powerful medications just as Vaught did and caught her mistake only in a last-minute triple-check. Garner said most nurses know all too well the pressures that contribute to such an error: long hours, crowded hospitals, imperfect protocols and the inevitable creep of complacency in a job with daily life-or-death stakes. Shots - Health News A Doctor Confronts Medical Errors - And Flaws In The System That Create Mistakes And experts say prosecutions like Vaught's loom large for a profession terrified of the criminalization of such mistakes - especially because her case hinges on an automated system for dispensing drugs that many nurses use every day. Fatal errors are generally handled by licensing boards and civil courts. Prosecutors do not allege in their court filings that Vaught intended to hurt Murphey or was impaired by any substance when she made the mistake, so her prosecution is a rare example of a health care worker facing years in prison for a medical error. If convicted of reckless homicide, Vaught faces up to 12 years in prison. If Vaught's story had followed the path of most medical errors, it would have been over hours later, when the Tennessee Board of Nursing revoked her license and almost certainly ended her nursing career.īut Vaught's case is different: This week, she goes on trial in Nashville on criminal charges of reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult for the killing of Charlene Murphey, the 75-year-old patient who died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in late December 2017. Shots - Health News Former nurse found guilty in accidental injection death of 75-year-old patient She did not shirk responsibility for the error, but she said the blame was not hers alone. Vaught, 38, admitted her mistake at a Tennessee Board of Nursing hearing last year, saying she became 'complacent' in her job and 'distracted' by a trainee while operating the computerized medication cabinet. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient's breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered. The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. RaDonda Vaught, with her attorney, Peter Strianse, is charged with reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error killed a patient.įour years ago, inside the most prestigious hospital in Tennessee, nurse RaDonda Vaught withdrew a vial from an electronic medication cabinet, administered the drug to a patient and somehow overlooked signs of a terrible and deadly mistake.

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