Medical mistakes happen every day and many lives are impacted by them. I found this tragic story on msn.com about a devoted nurse who commits suicide after she accidentally overdosed an 8-month-old in intensive care. This case looks at the tragic endings of two victims; the infant and the nurse.
For registered nurse Kimberly Hiatt, the horror began last Sept. 14, the moment she realized she’d overdosed a fragile baby with 10 times too much medication.
Stunned, she told nearby staff at the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital what had happened. “It was in the line of, ‘Oh my God, I have given too much calcium,’” recalled a fellow nurse, Michelle Asplin, in a statement to state investigators.
In Hiatt’s 24-year career, all of it at Seattle Children’s, dispensing 1.4 grams of calcium chloride — instead of the correct dose of 140 milligrams — was the only serious medical mistake she’d ever made, public investigation records show.
“She was devastated, just devastated,” said Lyn Hiatt, 49, of Seattle, Kim’s partner and co-parent of their two children, Eli, 18, and Sydney, 16.
That mistake turned out to be the beginning of an unraveled life, contributing not only to the death of the child, 8-month-old Kaia Zautner, but also to Hiatt’s firing, a state nursing commission investigation — and Hiatt’s suicide on April 3 at age 50.
Hiatt’s dismissal — and her death — raise larger questions about the impact of errors on providers, the so-called “second victims” of medical mistakes. That’s a phrase coined a decade ago by Dr. Albert Wu, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It’s meant to describe the twin casualties caused by a serious medical mistake: The first victim is the patient, the person hurt or killed by a preventable error — but the second victim is the person who has to live with the aftermath of making it.
Click here to continue reading the tragedy of events at msn.com.
