Nursing Negligence Attorneys in Baltimore and Washington DC
Both doctors and patients rely on nurses to competently administer care. Nurses are responsible for much of the work of caring for patients, acting as the first line of defense against sickness, injury, and death. Nursing negligence is a major problem that can result in unnecessary suffering or worse for patients.
The Maryland medical malpractice law firm of Schochor, Staton, Goldberg and Cardea, P.A. is a powerful advocate for victims of nursing negligence. With offices in Maryland and Washington D.C., our firm resources include a team of full-time medical investigators and medical professionals throughout the United States. If you or a loved one was the victim of nursing negligence, learn your rights during a free case review.
What is Nursing Negligence?
Nurses are required to be attendant and observant towards their patients, responding to urgent needs ensuring that they are healthy and stable, and relaying important information about their conditions to doctors. Staffing shortages at many hospitals mean that nurses are often overworked and nursing errors are increasingly common.
Nursing negligence is any action or lack thereof that endangers the safety and well-being of patients. Common examples of nursing negligence include:
- Failure to monitor a patient or notice changes in their vital signs.
- Failure to properly diagnose a patient’s ailments.
- Shift change errors: the nurse fails to properly hand off duties to another nurse at the end of a shift.
- Failure to convey important information to a patient’s physician.
- Failure to carry out the doctor’s orders.
- Allowing patients to leave their beds when they are incapable. Some patients insist on using the restroom or otherwise getting up when they are too weak to do so without assistance. This makes them a risk for falling and requires nurses to ensure that patients stay in their beds for their own safety or provide required assistance.
- Medication errors: nurses are responsible for ensuring that patients receive the right medications and in the proper doses.
- Failure to use patient lifts.
- Providing care without possessing the appropriate training.
