Medication

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operations. The Charge Nurse is responsible for all the nurses and making sure the nursing care is delivered correctly and safely. The Chief Resident acts as the liaison to all the residents. The Social Services Representative is the one knowledgeable about the hospital as well as the larger community can provide for patient care. The Head of the Ethics Committee and the Hospital Board Member are at the meeting to ensure that the hospital policies and regulations are met and to discuss the proper action to take for incidents like this not to happen again.

No one is perfect; everyone is prone to making mistakes especially in highly stressful environments. “Physicians will always make mistakes. The decisive factor will be how we handle them. Patient safety and physician welfare will be well served if we can be more honest about out errors to our patients, our colleagues, and ourselves.” (Wu, 2000) The main ethical issue discussed was the fact an intern had the life of a patient in her hands, and the patient ultimately died. The circumstances were the following: lack of medical history, no supervision, stressful environment, and patient in a significant amount of pain. The physician in charge of the Emergency room did not foresee the specific act, but it is the person responsible for the intern’s actions. The intern is starting off as a doctor and did not have the proper guidance, while the resident directly in charge of the intern only lied and altered the medical records of the patient to cover up what truly happened. Those are all the ethical concerns that were discussed.

With a fatality, the Head of the Ethics Committee determined the plan of action to take in this case. The resident who falsified the medical records, and did not adequately supervise his intern will be terminated effective immediately for the felony he committed. The intern was trying to help the patient’s pain and did what she thought was right with the little information she had on the patient; she will have a one-month suspension from the program and the school will be informed of the incident. Ultimately, the Medical Director was the person in charge and deserves to be reprimanded for setting an example, and the director will be suspended for three months with no pay. The future precautions that will be taken would be retraining staff in the hospital code of conduct, policies, and procedures. Incidents like the one discussed today are avoidable, and with the proper training, it should not happen again. The name of the hospital is important, and these kinds of incidents should not occur. Our mission is to save lives, so this is what needs to be