Assignment: Standards of care

Assignment: Standards of care

A 33-year-old male swallows 30 antidepressants and tells his wife, “I want to die.” She takes him to the local hospital’s emergency department, where he is treated and released that same evening. In the hospital parking lot, he pushes a security guard and is arrested and taken into custody. In the county jail, a nurse places the man on suicide watch. The following evening, while the man is still in custody, a psychologist speaks to him for five minutes, then releases him from suicide watch. The man is returned to his cell, and two hours later, he hangs himself.

Does the emergency department have liability for discharging a suicidal patient without further treatment?
Does the psychologist have liability for releasing the patient from suicide watch after a five-minute consultation?
The psychologist is an “independent contractor” of the jail. Is the county liable for his actions?
LO 5.2

A woman gave birth in the back seat of a taxicab while en route to the hospital. To what standard of care would each of the following individuals be held?

The taxicab driver who comforted the mother
A registered nurse, also a passenger in the cab, who assisted the mother
A physician in general practice who was a passenger in the cab with the expectant mother and assisted the birth taking place in the cab
A police officer who stopped the cab for speeding, observed the situation, and assisted with the birth
A woman trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) worked as the office manager for an insurance business. When her coworker at the next desk had a heart attack and fell to the floor, the office manager began CPR and shouted for others in the room to dial 911. The department supervisor came running and told the office manager to stop CPR. She reluctantly obeyed. Emergency medical technicians arrived, but the heart attack victim died.

The victim’s husband sued the supervisor, the office manager, and the employees’ parent organization for failure to render medical assistance. In a finding for the defendants, an appeals court ruled there was “no duty of care” for the employees to render assistance. Despite this court’s ruling, in a similar situation, would you have acted as the CPR-trained office manager did? Explain your answer

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.