Seattle Children's Hospital Case Study

`At Seattle Children’s Hospital, Kimberly Hiatt had been a cardiac critical care nurse for 24 years. On Setember 14, 2010, she accidently gave an already sick 8-month old baby 1.4 grams of calcium chloride instead of the prescribed 140 milligrams. She immediately realized what had happened and stated “Oh my god, I have given too much calcium”. This was only the medical mistake she had ever made. A few days later, the baby died. Kimberly Hiatt was extremely affected by this incident. According to her partner, she was absolutely devastated. Kimberly had cared for baby Kaia many times since the baby was born with severe heart problems. Kaia’s family didn’t seek retribution after the baby’s death, however in the days following the accident, they just asked that she not provide direct care for her. This initiated a state board investigating into Kimberly and the parameters on whether she was permitted to keep her nursing license or not. The end result was 80 hours of course work on medication administration, a fine of 3,000 dollars, and four years of probation in where her supervisor reported on her every 90 days. She didn’t practice after her termination, because of April 3, 2015, she hung and killed herself in her home. This started a chain of events happening in Seattle

This model is designed to use the need of identifying and correcting errors other than focusing on the punishments of the employee. A line within this culture states that staff are not fired due to a human error. The focus on better the person as a medical professional, since humans can just make mistakes. It was argued that she should have realized that the dose was too much for an infant. The argument back was that a firing a nurse who made a mistake isn’t really solving anything. It in fact just caused more problems. It is thought that nurse who made a mistake could actually be more careful in the future than one who