Medical malpractices are prevalent in nursing practice, with people only identifying few. A nurse has a huge role in ensuring that a patient is safe. A nurse thus must demonstrate a high degree of competency to ensure that the patients are safe, and there are limited malpractices ( Frank & Danks,2019). Note that the cost of medical malpractices is felt not only by the patients but also by the nurse and the hospital as a whole. In this sense, finding ways to minimize them by understanding them and coming up with strategies to reduce their chances of occurring is a good step towards creating a healthcare environment that is sensitive to safety.
The first element of medical malpractice is a duty. The medical staff must owe the patient a duty where failure will result in medical malpractice ( Brous, 2019). Take a patient whose condition worsens because of failed appointments with the medical staff. The medical staff had a duty to be available for an appointment made and treat the patient. The next element is the breach of duty. Take, for instance, the situation of the failed appointment. In this case, the medical staff had a duty to attend to the patient during the appointment, where failure will be a breach of duty. In most cases, persons view the duty breach under the lenses of competency and professionalism. In this sense, the medical staff must fail to commit to specific issues that any reasonable professional, in this case, could have achieved.
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The third element is the damage. The damage is the result of breached duty. In the example provided of appointments, in case the patient's condition worse of, or the patient develops a complication because the nurse who was supposed attend to such a condition failed to show up during an appointment, the case qualifies as medical malpractice ( Graber et al., 2019). The last element is the cause of the action that lead to the damage. In the example, the cause is a failed appointment.
References
Brous, E. (2019). The Elements of a Nursing Malpractice Case, Part 1: Duty. AJN The American Journal of Nursing , 119 (7), 64-67.
Frank, L., &Danks, J. (2019). Perianesthesia Nursing Malpractice: Reducing the Risk of Litigation. Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing , 34 (3), 463-468.
Graber, M. L., Siegal, D., Riah, H., Johnston, D., & Kenyon, K. (2019). Electronic health record-related events in medical malpractice claims. Journal of patient safety , 15 (2), 77-85.
