The moment nurse RaDonda Vaught realized she had given a patient the wrong medication, she rushed to the doctors working to revive 75-year-old Charlene Murphey and told them what she had done. Within hours, she made a full report of her mistake to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Murphey died the next day, on Dec. 27, 2017. On Friday, a jury found Vaught guilty of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect.
That verdict—and the fact that Vaught was charged at all—worries patient safety and nursing groups that have worked for years to move hospital culture away from cover-ups, blame, and punishment, and toward the honest reporting of mistakes.
After a long, arduous battle, nurses at Longmont United Hospital were victorious and will now become the first private hospital in Colorado to join the National Nurses United union.
"Nurses are the backbone of the hospital, and we know what’s best for our patients," said Tricia Hartley, a registered nurse in the labor and delivery department at Longmont United.
"We just want to see safe care, and we've seen our nurse-to-patient ratios moving in an unsafe direction and we want to stop that."
Early-career nurses started at time when experienced nursing were leaving the profession in droves, hospital administrators and researchers across the country have reported.
Throughout it all, young nurses have remained determined to stay in the nursing field despite the stress.
Lawmakers are wrestling with how to bolster the state's health care workforce that experts say has dwindled for a variety of reasons — from burnout under the crush of COVID to fewer students entering the field as older professionals retire.