Negligence Claims in Emergency Departments: Analysis of Morphine Overdose and Duty of Care
Introduction
Emergency departments (EDS) operate in challenging environments, accepting patients who need immediate care. In the case under consideration, a 46-year-old man, after the accident, entered the department, was conscious, and reported severe pain. The workers injected him with morphine, and the following day, the patient died.
Notably, before receiving the medication, the patient did not report taking drugs or alcohol. A few years later, his estate claimed negligence and sued. The current paper considers events in which the cause of death is overdose and analyzes the elements of the negligence claim and defense from them.
Elements of Negligence Claim
Duty
The negligence claim includes several elements that must be included in the case to confirm the negligence. Considering the duty aspect, ED specialists had to deliver a certain level of care that was established by the standards (Fremgen, 2019). After assessing the condition, the staff provided the patient with the most appropriate treatment. The defense may therefore include a statement that, based on the information available, physicians made an assessment and addressed the pain problem.
Breach of Duty
Dereliction or breach of duty is the following element, which requires evaluation when establishing negligence. It suggests that the specialist did not perform the same actions that a professional of the same level should have when interacting with patients (Fremgen, 2019). The case does not specify how carefully the patient was interviewed regarding drug and alcohol intake. Drug testing is prescribed based on professional judgment and is not always accurate in the results (Stellpflug et al., 2020). The hospital can use the denial defense by saying that all necessary procedures were performed by calling witnesses to the incident and arguing that the patient’s fault is that he did not report his drug history.
Direct Cause
The next step in assessing the situation is establishing a direct or proximate cause. The reason for the man’s death is an overdose, which suggests that the specialists’ actions with morphine administration led to death. In this case, the defense can offer arguments that the reason was not the actions of the ED employees but the patient himself. In particular, the man took alcohol and drugs independently and did not inform the medical staff about it, which led to a fatal outcome.
Damage
The final aspect of a negligence claim is the damage. It suggests that the plaintiff is seeking compensation for the injury caused by negligence (Fremgen, 2019). In the presented case, compensation is claimed for the patient’s death and the suffering it brought.
The defense can use the same argument as before â the patient personally chose to take prohibited substances and not report them to specialists. In this case, the patient determined the situation’s outcome, not the specialist’s actions. Legal investigations, in turn, can find various weaknesses in defense arguments to establish the fact of negligence.
The Most Successful Element for the Negligence Claim
A weak element that can be used against doctors is a breach of duty. To prevent problems, specialists can request a drug test from patients admitted to the ED if they notice suspicious symptoms. Such a judgment can be subjective, and one can find arguments that experts did not conduct an assessment carefully enough before administering the medicine as a reasonable professional should. For example, the case mentions that the patient also took alcohol, which means he had a characteristic smell. Signs of alcohol consumption should have alerted specialists and presumably forced them to conduct testing.
Conclusion
Thus, analyzing the presented case, one may argue that the negligence claim elements are met, but can be challenged by the defense. In particular, it is not reliably known how carefully the patient was interviewed and whether signs of substance abuse were visible. If the patient deliberately hid information about drugs and alcohol and did not show signs of their use, the ED specialists took the necessary actions based on the data obtained. However, a breach of duty is possible if experts have conducted an insufficiently thorough assessment and missed signs of abuse, and did not require a drug test.
References
Fremgen, B. F. (2019). Medical law and ethics (6th ed.). Pearson.
Stellpflug, S. J., Cole, J. B., & Greller, H. A. (2020). Urine drug screens in the emergency department: The best test may be no test at all. Journal of Emergency Nursing, 46(6), 923-931. Web.