The cruel lesson of a single medical mistake

We all carry the memory of our mistakes. For healthcare workers like me, these memories surface in the early morning when we cannot sleep or at a bedside where, in some way, we are reminded of a patient who came before. Most were errors in judgment or near misses: a procedure we thought could wait, a subtle abnormality in vital signs that didn't register as a harbinger of serious illness, an X-ray finding missed, a central line nearly placed in the wrong blood vessel.

Even the best of us have stories of missteps, close calls that are caught before they ever cause a patient harm. But some are more devastating. RaDonda Vaught, a former Tennessee nurse, is awaiting sentencing for one particularly catastrophic case that took place in 2017. She administered a paralysing medication to a patient before a scan instead of the sedative she intended to give to quell anxiety. The patient stopped breathing and ultimately died.