We put our faith in the care and expertise of medical staff when we go to a hospital. After all, with their years of training and experience, who better do we have to trust? The strict and often highly demanding years of medical training required to work in the medical field tends to ensure that only the best of the best make the cut.
But in some pretty horrific cases, even well-trained medical staff may wind up making deadly errors that put the lives of their patients at risk. Sometimes, this may even result in their deaths.
As reported by Sin Chew Daily, a nurse in China made a grave error when she injected a 5-year-old boy with the wrong medication, which eventually led to his untimely death.
Local Chinese media said that the 5-year-old boy had initially been admitted to hospital for a high fever during 8th September 2019, and was diagnosed with viral encephalitis.
Doctors who attended to him prescribed him an intravenous drip of 75ml 20% mannitol, but nurses who performed the IV-drip mistakenly used a bag of 100ml noridazole sodium chloride instead! While we admit that we don’t have the necessary medical knowledge to understand either of those terms, the fact that the slip-up happened is pretty horrifying in itself.
By the time the mistake was found, the entire bag of solution was already fed into the boy’s body. While initially appearing normal, even after medical check-ups, the boy started to grow weaker.
He then suffered from a sudden onset of cardiac arrest and due to acute necrotising encephalopathy, medical staff were not able to resuscitate him. The boy unfortunately passed away.
The negligent nurse has since been dismissed by the hospital, and other relevant medical staff who had attended to the boy’s case are currently being investigated by the authorities.
We hope that the deceased little boy will be able to rest in peace, and we also extend our deepest condolences to his parents.
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