Legal Issues and the Role of Nurse Manager Essay

Legal Issues and the Role of Nurse Manager - Essay Example Failure to use due care can be considered as negligent behavior. Failure to meet standard of care, which results in injury to the patient, can make the medical professional liable for resulting damages. The medical professional can be a doctor, a nurse, or a health care provider. Causation helps determine whether the medical professional's carelessness caused injury. It is the most difficult element of negligence to prove and so courts have sometimes resorted to the theory of res ipsa loquitor. Three conditions for the application of res ipsa loquitur are "Personal injury" cases are legal disputes that arise when one person suffers harm from an accident or injury, and someone else might be legally responsible for that harm. Injury, which occurs due to someone's negligence in the patient's treatment, forms the basis of claim and lawsuit Negligence is failure to guard against risk of harm to others and imposes liability on whoever is responsible for negligence. In order to prove that negligence has occurred, the following criterion needs to be met and proven in a court of law: In the given case harm has occurred to the patient who fractured her hand. The nurse, nurse manager and the hospital owe the duty of care to the patient and have failed in discharging their duty successfully. Who is liable and to what extent, demands an evaluation of the circumstances, which caused the injury to the patient. This idea of evaluation of circumstances is common in healthcare. It has been noted that, "although a particular action or omission may be the immediate cause of an incident, closer analysis usually reveals a series of events and departures from safe practice, each influenced by the working environment and the wider organisational context. This more complex picture is gaining acceptance in health care" (Vincent et al, 2000). The omission may or may not be purely an act of carelessness; it could be a result of how work processes are organised making the nurse manager and hospital more liable, than the nurse who may not be a direct cause of injury. The fact that in her chart the nurse has documented that "this would not have happened if I had been present to help her" establishes that the nurse made a mistake. However one also needs to consider whether this mistake is truly negligence. This calls for an evaluation of the circumstances in which the injury occurred. Two situations are discussed below: Situation 1.: Delay in response because nurse was gossiping/careless/did not see the call light or failed to stick to the