What Are the Most Common Nursing Mistakes?

With all the pressure put on the medical profession, it’s no surprise that nurses make mistakes. In this article, we’ll discuss the most common nursing mistakes.

Nursing is a particularly challenging occupation. A nurse will work a lot of hours, experience high pressure situations, and have to deal with some emotionally challenging times. With all this considered, it’s no surprise that nurses make mistakes. These mistakes can be costly for nurses and their patients.

Understanding the common nursing mistakes is key to knowing if you need medical negligence lawyers. We’ve decided to take a look at some of the typical mistakes a nurse can make, how they can affect you, and what it means for the quality of care given.

How Can Nurses Be Liable for Medical Negligence?

It is important to understand how nurses can be liable for medical negligence, especially when dealing with patients in a hospital setting. You might think that the responsibility for patients falls to the doctors, but this is not the case.

Qualified doctors are vastly outnumbered by nurses in a hospital environment. A doctor is expected to move through a ward constantly, providing support to nurses and dealing with patients, but they are not a fixed part of the ward.

Typically, the patients on a ward are looked after and handled by the nurses for 90% of the day. They’ll be the ones providing assistance to people, changing bed sheets, filling out paperwork, and offering medical care. Therefore, the nurses can be liable for medical negligence if they are the ones designated to watch over you during your stay in the hospital.

Common Types of Medical Negligence

Medical negligence happens more than you might think, and it can be often down to a handful of simple errors. Some of the most common mistakes made include:

Medication Errors

You’ll often need medication while you’re in hospital. This medication tends to either to save your life, heal an injury, or provide pain relief. Whatever the reason for a person’s medication, it will often be administered by a nurse.

If the nurse gives the wrong medication, either by giving an incorrect dosage, or the wrong substance entirely, then a person could be put in severe danger. It depends a lot on the type of medication someone received, but too little pain relief could leave you in agony, or an incorrect medication could have untold impacts on your body. For nurses, this puts them as negligent in their duties.

Fatigue

Some nurses can work up to 24 hours on a ward with only a few breaks. They may also have multiple 12 hour shifts lined up back to back. Understandably, a lot of nurses can get fatigued after a few days of intensive work, and fatigue means they’re liable to make mistakes.

However, this fatigue can be costly for the patient. Fatigue can lead to simple mistakes being made such as misapplying something or failing to spot an issue which could lead to harm of a patient. Fatigue influences everyone differently, so it is hard to say with any real certainty what could happen.

Incorrect Documentation

Nurses will be directly responsible for filling out the paperwork associated with each patient which creates an official record of their medical situation.

Unfortunately, it is possible for nurses to incorrectly document your symptoms and situation, which results in incorrect information being put onto the system. This means that doctors and nurses can incorrectly handle your needs moving forward, which is obviously dangerous for those in vulnerable situations.

Avoiding common nursing mistakes…

Nurses are amazing people who work tirelessly to provide support to people in hospitals. However, they are human and like everyone else, can make mistakes easily. If this happens, and a patient sustains harm or injury, then it is perfectly acceptable for patients to seek compensation through a medical negligence claim.

Please be advised that this article is for general informational purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for advice from a trained medical professional. Be sure to consult a medical professional or healthcare provider if you’re seeking medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment. We are not liable for risks or issues associated with using or acting upon the information on this site.

Image Credit:

Image 1: DarkoStojanovic

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Image 3: DarkoStojanovic

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