The Texas Board of Nursing (“Board”) prosecuted a complaint (“Complaint”) against our Client, C.O., LVN, which alleged she was responsible for a patient death which was caused by discontinued seizure medication.
While C.O. inadvertently discontinued the seizure medication, she was not responsible for the patient’s death. C.O. was a PRN nurse who only visited the pertinent facility twice a month. The facility had a number of policies and procedures in place designed to catch medication errors before they caused serious patient harm. At least ten full-time employees at the facility were charged with carrying out these policies, but all ignored same. The patient did not begin to experience seizures until thirteen days after the medication was discontinued – which means that the medication error policies were ignored for the same span. The error was not caught until sixteen days after the discontinuation – the next shift C.O. worked at the facility. By then, the patient had to be transferred to a larger facility, and soon expired.
By providing the Board with a thorough explanation of the willful violations of the facility’s medication error policies and expounding the details of C.O.’s stellar ten-year career as a nurse, we secured a remedial, non-disciplinary settlement for our Client.