Nursing Negligence

Nurses have an important role in good patient care. First, on a basic level, nurses are responsible for following doctors' orders promptly and accurately. For example, if a doctor prescribes a particular drug for a patient, the nurse must give the correct drug in the right amount. Second, because physicians cannot be with their patients all of the time, nurses are the doctors' eyes and ears. To do this part of their job, nurses need to carefully watch and listen to the patient for clues on how the patient is doing. Third, nurses are responsible for ongoing patient assessment and documentation of the patient's condition.

Finally and most importantly, nurses are accountable for evaluating patients' immediate health needs and responding to these needs. A nurse's failure to do any one of these things can have devastating results for the patient. During trial, SS&L lawyers recently reached a multi-million dollar settlement with a hospital whose nurses failed to perform and document ongoing physical assessments of a patient whose decline in neurological status, although rapidly progressing over a period of several hours, was entirely missed until paralysis was complete and irreversible.

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