This is the tragic story of a woman and a girl woman and how not being perfect is a crime.
The woman is Julie Thao, a registered nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, for 13 years who had outstanding job performance ratings. The girl woman was Jasmine Gant, a 16-year-old high school student who got pregnant.
The facts are these: On July 5 of last year, Gant went into labor and was admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital.
Her nurse was Thao, who had worked a 16-hour shift from 8 a.m. to midnight on the July 4th holiday, slept over at the hospital and went back to work in the birthing unit at 7 a.m.
Gant’s labor was complicated by an infection. Thao had intended to give her penicillin intravenously for the infection. Instead, she did not follow the hospital’s bar-code system, which is used to double-check the accuracy of medication, after accidentally removing a bag for an epidural anesthetic from a locker. Ignoring the warning on the bag, she gave Gant the anethestic. Gant had a seizure and died a short time later. The baby survived.
St. Mary’s quickly apologized to Gant’s family. The state professional regulation and licensing department told the hospital to limit Thao’s shifts to eight hours and later retroactively suspended her nursing license for nine months. It cited the 330-bed hospital for five violations but cleared it of any penalties after it updated its policies and initiated a re-education program for its nurses.
Then, in November a state prosecutor dropped a bombshell: Thao was charged with neglect of a patient and causing great bodily harm, a felony that carries a six-year jail sentence and hefty fine.
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