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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Nurse's suicide highlights twin tragedies of medical errors















by JoNel Aleccia
Health writer - msnbc.com

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.

No question, the patients are the top concern in a nation where 1 in 7 Medicare patients experience serious harm because of medical errors and hospital infections each year, and 180,000 patients die, according to a November 2010 study by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General.

That’s nearly double the 98,000 deaths attributed to preventable errors in the pivotal 2000 report “To Err is Human,” by the Institute of Medicine, which galvanized the nation's patient safety movement.

In reality, though, the doctors, nurses and other medical workers who commit errors are often traumatized as well, with reactions that range from anxiety and sleeping problems to doubt about their professional abilities — and thoughts of suicide, according to two recent studies.

Surgeons who believed they made medical errors were more than three times as likely to have considered suicide as those who didn’t, according to a January survey of more nearly 8,000 participants published in the Archives of Surgery.

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 The entire story can be found here.