A panel of legal and medical experts will take part in a teach-in on healthcare liability from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6, in the Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Room, 101, on Quinnipiac University’s North Haven Campus, 370 Bassett Road. This program is free and open to the public.
The expert panel will examine the 2017 case of RaDonda Vaught, a registered nurse who made a medical error that resulted in the death of patient under her care. Many experts attribute the error not just to Vaught but also to Vanderbilt University Medical Center because it maintained conditions that increased the likelihood of such errors. Earlier this year, Vaught was convicted of criminally negligent homicide.
“Vaught’s case raises many questions about the precedent of using criminal law to prosecute healthcare professionals for bad patient outcomes in a poorly designed health care system. This has huge implications for how we educate health care students,” said JT Torres, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Quinnipiac. “During this teach-in, we will examine how healthcare professionals and students should think about liability in the patient care setting.”
The panel will include: Julie Dickinson, clinical risk manager at the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System; Leonard Dwarica, distinguished practitioner in residence for health law, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy, and director of the health law concentration at Quinnipiac; Gladys Vallespir Ellett, assistant professor of nursing at Quinnipiac; Caitlin Hanrahan, who recently completed the accelerated nursing program at Quinnipiac and is working at Yale-New Haven Hospital; Jennifer L. Herbst, professor of law and medical sciences at Quinnipiac; Ernie Teitell, who has practiced criminal and civil law for 45 years; and Dr. Rich Teitell, a board-certified emergency medicine physician.
For more information, contact Torres at Jonathan.Torres@qu.edu.