A former nurse is under trial after accidentally injecting a drug over a sedative that killed the patient afterward.
RaDonda Vaught, 37, is facing a charge of reckless homicide for administering the drug vecuronium to Charlene Murphey, 75, instead of the sedative Versed on December 26, 2017. The claustrophobic woman was accidentally given a paralytic drug that shut down her breathing.
The attorney of the former Tennessee nurse who was on trial for the death of a patient that was accidentally injected with a paralyzing drug told jurors Tuesday that the woman is being blamed for systemic problems at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Vaught was a nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who injected a patient with a powerful paralytic drug rather than a mild sedative. If convicted, she faces up to 12 years in prison.
It wasn’t until almost a year after the death of Murphey that an anonymous tipster told Tennessee and federal officials about the fatal medication mistake.
At the time of the tip, Vanderbilt had already reached a settlement with Murphey’s family and had fired Vaught, who was later hired at another Nashville hospital. Criminal charges were filed in February 2019. The state revoked Vaught’s nursing license in July 2021.
Vaught could not find Versed in an automatic drug dispensing cabinet because it was listed under the generic name midazolam. Instead, she used an override mechanism to type in “VE” then grabbed vecuronium, according to court records.
Vaught left the imaging area after injecting the drug, but minutes later another employee noticed Murphey was unresponsive. The family removed the woman from life support in the early hours of December 27.
Debbie Housel, Nashville Assistant District Attorney General, said during the opening statement that the nurse ignored warning labels on the medication and didn’t notice the medication she chose was very different from the one needed.
The prosecutor said: “RaDonda Vaught recklessly ignored everything she learned in school” when she administered vecuronium, a drug sometimes used in executing prisoners.
Peter Strianse, defense attorney, told the jury that the hospital was at least partially to blame for Murphey’s death. He said that in 2017, problems with a new electronic records system led to delays in communication between the pharmacy and the hospital’s automatic drug dispensing cabinets.
This often-forced nurses to override the system, he said. There also was no scanner for the medication in the imaging area of the hospital where the accident happened.
Vaught admitted her error as soon as she realized it, and the state medical board initially took no action against her. The finger-pointing only began after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services learned of the error and made a surprise inspection at Vanderbilt, according to Strianse.
Strianse said: “This was a high-stakes game of musical chairs and blame seeking. When the music stopped, there was no chair for RaDonda Vaught.”
Testifying on Tuesday was Murphey’s daughter-in-law Chandra Murphey, who cried as she recalled Charlene Murphy’s last days. The two had been preparing Christmas dinner on December 24, 2017, when the older woman started complaining about her vision.
Chandra convinced her to go to the emergency room, where they found a brain bleed. Murphey was transferred to Vanderbilt’s intensive care unit but was getting better before the accident, Chandra testified.
She was at the hospital with her mother-in-law when she was taken downstairs for the PET scan and saw her again when she was brought back upstairs, surrounded by the doctors who were trying to save her life.
Chandra asked: “How in the world do you take someone down for a PET scan and bring her back like this? They basically took her down fine and brought her back dead.”
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