A case of a 65-year-old female named Loretta Macpherson, who died after a medication error in Oregon was brought up in the CBS News in December 4, 2014. Ms. Macpherson was mistakenly given a paralyzing agent called rocuronium, instead of an anti-seizure medication called fosphenytoin. This incident caused her to stop breathing, go into cardiac arrest and lead to irreversible brain damage (CBS Interactive Inc., 2014). According to Dr. Michael Boileau, “that mistake, that error, has caused her death” (Moran, L., 2014). During the investigation, they found that the right prescription of fosphenytoin was done. The error occurred when “a pharmacy worker mistakenly filled the IV bag labeled ‘fosphenytoin’ with a paralyzing drug called rocuronium”…
Address situations with honesty and correctly. Tactical Planning Delegate to mid level managers and employee safety responsibilities Accountability across the company at all levels…
Staff should follow the complaints procedure in place, who is their first contact? Make yourself familiar with the procedure and policy.…
1. A physician forgets to tell a patient about the risk of combining a prescribed drug with aspirin and the patient takes two aspirin for a headache: In this scenario the extend of liability depends on the drug being prescribed, if the drug is dispensing in generic form with no warnings, then the physician could be considered liable, however it is still possible to make the argument that the patient would have been proactive about potential contraindications, and consult the dispensing pharmacy. If the drug comes in a package with an insert clearly stating contraindications, the fault should come to the patient for not following due diligence and reading the package insert.…
If the pharmacy get to keep its license and can respond financially to the penalties and sanctions resulting of this mistakes, this episode should serve to its owner as an attention call to make some changes on the company structure, where the middle managers and the rest of the employees are more accountable for not careful mistakes and become more conscious about the responsibility they have toward the community they work…
Employees have the responsibility to address any concerns with other Employees that exhibit questionable proficiency, impairment, or unethical/illicit behavior. Employees must remain accountable and are required to bring these behaviors to Management attention if behaviors are not resolved internally.…
Care should be taken at all times when administrating medication as it could be given to the wrong person which could lead to them suffering, or something as simple as the wrong dose. This type of mistake can have a devastating result for example in 2005 2 nurses miscalculated the dose of a drug needed to slow down a baby boys heart rate. He was given 10x the dose and he died.…
-In total 22 nurses took part in the experiment, they did not know about the study. Between 7pm-9pm night shift, the nurses received a phone call from a unknown doctor asking them to administer a drug to a patient- (astroten). The amount of drug they were asked to give would have been an overdose, (it was a placebo). They were asked to give 20mg, the box was labelled maximum daily dose 10mg. The drug was also not authorized for the ward the nurses were working on and nurses should not carry out orders given over the phone.…
The medical field is filled with research and new or improved experimental treatments which require FDA approval for public consumption. Despite FDA approval these drugs are still not completely safe and therefore come with a variety of warnings and side effects. A question of fault sometimes arises when a user experiences a complication. That was precisely what happened with an injectable form of a drug called Phenergan. The Phenergan label advised extreme caution and provided a clear warning of what could happen if an artery was hit during injection.…
In the United States there have been numerous medication issues that healthcare institutions have dealt with. The medication has risen in cost; few medications that have been approved by the FDA have resulted in severe side effects. That has led to the health institution liable for legal disputes, lawsuits and a tarnished reputation. This medication issue continues to affect the productivity and the growth of healthcare institution. According to National Academies there at least 1.5 million people every year that deal with medication errors (Dobbins, C., Stencel, C., 2006). That the extra medical cost alone is about 3.5 billion dollars, but does not include the lost wages, the productivity and additional health care cost.…
Before the discovery of gallium, its existence and properties were predicted by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. He named the supposed element eka-aluminum as he predicted the element would be below aluminum in the periodic table of elements. In the year of 1875, the element Gallium was discovered by French chemist Paul E. Lecoq de Boisbaudran through a spectroscope in Paris. De Boisbaudran extracted gallium from a zinc blende ore from the Pyrenees and obtained .65 grams from 430 kilograms of ore. He isolated gallium by electrolysis of its hydroxide in potassium hydroxide solution. The origin of the name comes from the Latin word ‘Gallia’, which means France.…
As health professionals we are responsible for the welfare and safety of our patients is our duty to provide services where their recovery is guaranteed in the shortest time possible. “Caring about mistakes and failures is an important part of improvement” (Austin, 2016, p.18). When administering medications we put into practice our knowledge and follow the correct and meet with the national goal number one according to JC is the correct identification of the patient to avoid mistakes. “The Joint Commission is an independent, not-for-profit organization that accredits more than 20,000 health-care organizations and programs in the United States has historically had a tremendous impact on planning for quality control in acute-care hospitals”…
While humans tend to worry about the endangered species in the world, it is often forgotten that animals aren't the only ones that can be endangered; elements can too. Elements can range from 1-10 on the relative supply risk scale (created by the Royal Society of Chemistry). The scale is based off of “the scores for crustal abundance, reserve distribution, production concentration, substitutability, recycling rate and political stability scores.” (Element) Take an average risk element for example: chromium. On the scale for relative risk supply it is a 6.2 and slowly increasing due to the fact that is commonly used in everyday life. Chromium is frequently used to reinforce steel to prevent it from rusting (stainless steel) and is also used as an industrial catalyst and pigment to create the extremely red glow in rubies. It is found in most abundance in chromite in countries such as India, South Africa, Kazakhstan and Turkey. Although it can be recycled the substitutability of this particular element is very low, being that you cannot replace it with ease.…
* The management is aware of this but is not doing anything about it. Because of this, the employees continue to violate the…
What sort of collective action against the subsidiary should be taken in order to prevent such events?…