CNN Video: Pharmacist Jailed in Tot's Death

[Cogman]

So only people that are a danager should be in jail?

Damm wife messed with me one to many times, so I killed her. I promise to never remarry and I have never hurt anybody before. Good for you?

obviously not, because your promise doesn't mean jack. There is no way to ensure that you never kill again short of jail time.

but keep it up captain bad analogy.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

^

So a cop kicks in your door and kills a family member. He has a peice of paper with your address on it and he thought they had a gun. Opps someone typed in the wrong street, simple mistake.

Again, you ok with that as well?

So the standard you would enforce is perfection. The hospital would normally get the balls sued off of them, and depending on the situation the pharmacist will be held accountable as well. There would be a review, and if his behavior was egregious, he'd be fried. If he came in drunk or high, he should be jailed because that's clearly irresponsible behavior.

Now I'll ask you this. This is completely out of line with how these sad incidents are normally handled. There's a very good chance that this decision will be reversed. That means the judge will have deprived a citizen of liberty by committing a legal error.

How long should the judge be imprisoned? After all he has a position of public trust.

Clearly you are an example of Hayabusa's Maxim. "No one knows your job better than someone who's never done it."

How can I become perfect? Where do we find perfect people to take over the various aspects of medicine? Sending them to jail won't allow them to walk on water, and yes, that's what you are asking.

You don't want pharmacists or doctors or nurses, you want Mary Poppins.

Now we do take mistakes seriously. I work a 12 hour day with no lunch and that's the norm. I'm constantly on the lookout. Have I ever made a mistake? I'll answer it this way. There are two kinds of practitioners, those who have made mistakes, and those who lie and say they haven't.

As far as you go, I suggest you carry a card in case you are in an accident which says. "I will only be treated by perfect people incapable of error".

Make your will out to me.

 

[Jaskalas]

So only people that are a danager should be in jail?

Damm wife messed with me one to many times, so I killed her. I promise to never remarry and I have never hurt anybody before. Good for you?

he did not fill the prescription himself

Not a single analogy of yours has taken that into account.

Moreover, showing the capacity to violently kill an innocent is a great deal different than the case before us.

 

[JS80]

obviously not, because your promise doesn't mean jack. There is no way to ensure that you never kill again short of jail time.

but keep it up captain bad analogy.

it's obvious marlin is captain perfect lol.

keep digging that hole marlin.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Fired and license revoked...maybe fined...would have been enough IMO.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Fired and license revoked...maybe fined...would have been enough IMO.

That still won't work. Certainly there is a malpractice issue here, however it appears that this is a simple (albeit tragic) mistake. Sometimes a license will be suspended and if it can be shown that a practitioner acted recklessly, then yes loss of license and even imprisonment does happen. A surgeon operating under the influence of alcohol for example.

While the desire to punish is obviously great on the part of many, consider that if you start firing MDs and removing the license of those who had a patient die. People talk about malpractice premiums. Start locking people up instead, revoking licenses and such and you won't have medicine- at all.

Remember we aren't talking a crack addict here.

 

[dmcowen674]

^

So a cop kicks in your door and kills a family member. He has a peice of paper with your address on it and he thought they had a gun. Opps someone typed in the wrong street, simple mistake.

Again, you ok with that as well?

It's called No Knock warrants and happens all the time.

They simply go Opps and go on to the next warrant after they have killed innocents.

Just look up Atlanta Grandmother for supporting Internet search.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

It's called No Knock warrants and happens all the time.

They simply go Opps and go on to the next warrant after they have killed innocents.

Just look up Atlanta Grandmother for supporting Internet search.

Which is fine, but has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I might as well compare your unfortunate circumstance to a bank robbery. It would hardly be a fair comparison.

 

[daishi5]

That still won't work. Certainly there is a malpractice issue here, however it appears that this is a simple (albeit tragic) mistake. Sometimes a license will be suspended and if it can be shown that a practitioner acted recklessly, then yes loss of license and even imprisonment does happen. A surgeon operating under the influence of alcohol for example.

While the desire to punish is obviously great on the part of many, consider that if you start firing MDs and removing the license of those who had a patient die. People talk about malpractice premiums. Start locking people up instead, revoking licenses and such and you won't have medicine- at all.

Remember we aren't talking a crack addict here.

Perhaps you can clear this up for me. I looked up the original story about the child's death. The story says "she prepared Emily's chemotherapy bag with a 23.4% saline solution, 26 times the 0.9% normally used." http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2008-02-24-emily_N.htm
Does that mean they gave her too much saline, or too much of the chemotherapy drug? Shouldn't the IV have had that information on the bag, that the nurse should also have checked against her medication orders?

 

[Cogman]

Perhaps you can clear this up for me. I looked up the original story about the child's death. The story says "she prepared Emily's chemotherapy bag with a 23.4% saline solution, 26 times the 0.9% normally used." http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2008-02-24-emily_N.htm
Does that mean they gave her too much saline, or too much of the chemotherapy drug? Shouldn't the IV have had that information on the bag, that the nurse should also have checked against her medication orders?

The technician is the one that put the bag together, so even though it said .9%, it still had 23.4%. saline solutions are generally just sterilized salt water. So the technician that prepared it should have known something was wrong when they started shoveling in salt.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Perhaps you can clear this up for me. I looked up the original story about the child's death. The story says "she prepared Emily's chemotherapy bag with a 23.4% saline solution, 26 times the 0.9% normally used." http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2008-02-24-emily_N.htm
Does that mean they gave her too much saline, or too much of the chemotherapy drug? Shouldn't the IV have had that information on the bag, that the nurse should also have checked against her medication orders?

It was a severely hypertonic solution. That's all it took. Now I haven't had time to pull out all the particulars, but how it normally works is that a standard solution of saline has a medication introduced. It's labeled and the pharmacist checks what was used. Now the problem is that if the technician screwed up the solution, the same components would have been used, so the "right" med would appear in the basket.

Clearly something went wrong, and that doesn't make it all better. Far from it. What happened needs to be addressed, and whatever went wrong corrected. Should there be an action against him? That I can't say. Certainly he's liable for civil damages, and then we go from there. Throwing a good practitioner in the slammer or taking his license in the absence of gross negligence? You'll be doing your own surgery if that becomes the defacto standard. Certainly they aren't paying me nearly enough to be Jesus.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

The technician is the one that put the bag together, so even though it said .9%, it still had 23.4%. saline solutions are generally just sterilized salt water. So the technician that prepared it should have known something was wrong when they started shoveling in salt.

Depending on how the tech prepared the solution and what she did with the ingredients after she was finished, it may have been fundamentally impossible to catch the mistake. Again, I don't know just what happened, but if she labeled it properly and didn't say she added extra saline, how could anyone tell?

 

[Dari]

He should have done his job. Drugs are no joke and he should have been aware of that.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

He should have done his job. Drugs are no joke and he should have been aware of that.

Hayabusa's Maxim FTW.