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VOL. 43 | NO. 13 | Friday, March 29, 2019
Records: VUMC Nurse in fatal drug-swap made at least 10 mistakes
NASHVILLE (AP) — Prosecutors say a Tennessee nurse made multiple mistakes before fatally injecting a patient with the wrong drug.
The Tennessean reports documents filed Wednesday say Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught was distracted by an unrelated conversation when she injected 75-year-old Charlene Murphey with the wrong drug in 2017.
The new documents say she didn't notice multiple warning labels, and didn't notice one drug was a powder while the other was a liquid.
Court and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services documents say Vaught couldn't find the sedative Versed in an automatic dispensing cabinet. They say she used an override to type in "VE" and picked the first drug that came up, choosing the paralyzing drug vecuronium instead.
The former nurse has pleaded not guilty to reckless homicide.