$4,400,000 Award In Case Of Nurse Trainee's Error Lead To Baby's Brain Damage

No one is born a great doctor or a great nurse. They need to learn and then practice on actual patients. But people want a safety net should the physicians or nurse in training make an error. We also expect, however, that they will be carefully supervised and their work will be reviewed by a competent, experienced doctor or nurse. Patients do not generally think about this as they simply expect that the physician treating them is fully qualified. That safety net comes in the form of supervision by experienced doctors and nurses.

The learning curve is steep yet it does exist. During the training period these new physicians and nurses will inevitably make mistakes. While many errors will have little, if any, repercussions some will lead to serious harm or possibly in the fatality of a patient. That is why they need supervision by more senior doctors and nurses who can catch and correct the errors. Else, even a single mistake that is not caught by the supervising doctor or nurse can produce tragic results.

In a reported case an expectant mother, near full term, went to the hospital because she was having bad nausea and vomiting. At the hospital the woman was monitored by a nurse trainee. The nurse trainee read the results as normal, concluding that the baby was fine and in no danger, even though they in fact demonstrated signs of severe fetal distress, a situation which calls for immediate attention. The woman was sent home not knowing that her baby was suffering from a lack of oxygen..

Three days after the child was delivered as planned. Despite the fact that the newborn survived the delivery she was born with severe brain damage. She developed cerebral palsy. She had persistent seizures. The little girl spent the following four years of her life with recurring seizures, undergoing therapy and had 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 father and mother and by her 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 demonstrates how dangerous it is for a nurse trainee to diagnose patients without supervision from a doctor or a registered supervising nurse. True, even experienced physicians and nurses can sometimes misread a fetal heart rate strip. A nurse trainee just has not read a sufficient number of monitor strips to build the appropriate level of competency in interpreting one. A mistake on the part of the nurse trainee and the failure to appropriately supervise the nurse trainee, as in the case above, may lead to a medical malpractice claim.

By: J. Hernandez

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Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting birth injury medical malpractice cases. You can learn more about fetal distress and other types of birth injuries such as group b strep matters by visiting the website