Graham 1 Blakely Graham English 101 Professor Alicia Bolton November 5, 2013 Annotated Bibliography Mistakes and errors

are made every day throughout the world. Some of them are huge and may include the deaths of many people. Some include allowing terrorist attacks, plane crashes, fires, and mass shootings to occur. There could be many reasons these mistakes may have occurred: security wasnt good enough, the pilot was not paying attention to everything, someone left an oven on or a wire out, and maybe even somebody could have seen a person too young to be handling a gun and did not notify anyone. Many of these mistakes could have easily been fixed and therefore prevented the mass destruction and deaths caused. While these events are very large and spoken about often, there are some very small mishaps that cause only single deaths. These accidents may not be well known and are often looked over by the mass population; however, these accidents may have a large impact on the people affected by these small mistakes. In Search of the Lost Cord, by Steven Casey, is about a four year old girl who has been battling birth defects and surgeries her whole life and is electrocuted because of nurse Karen Nessens mistake in hooking up the girls heart monitor. Yes, this is a mistake that sounds very tragic, but do you ever hear about these events? Have you ever considered this happening to you or a loved one? Many people look these events over thinking, this could never happen to me; however, it very well could. These are all reasons that nurses and doctors should take better protocol and be much more careful when handling the little actions of everyday events in their work field. Some people do not realize that even the smallest mistake, such as plugging a cord in the wrong connector, could kill them or their loved ones. This bibliography contains sources I have found that support and refute the human errors in the medical field and what can be done to prevent them.

Graham 2 Chilton, Lynn. Medical Error Prevention for Healthcare Providers. Medscape. Web. 3 November 2013. This web entry is from the Medscape nurses and is about medical error prevention. It provides precautions nurses should take so they will not make errors. It was used in the National Conference of Gerontological Nurse Practitioners 25th annual meeting. It provides safety principles, and strategies to help prevent errors. This website gives information used in a major conference in the US. This helps establish credibility. It also provides many ways that nurses can be more precautious in their actions. It also gives a list of references at the bottom to establish trustworthiness. I am using this article to give ways that nurses can be more careful in the actions of the daily life in a hospital. Time is a big issue for the error that Nurse Nessen made; Healthcare professionals should put safety ahead of timeliness (Chilton). Had Nessen taken the time to make sure she had the right cord the little girl would not have died. Killed by Care: Making Medicine Safe. Medical Mistakes Kill Thousands of People Annually Films Media Group, 2004. Films On Demand. Web. 3 November 2013. This film is about an incident that occurred in Canada due to medical errors. Twelve infants were killed due to medical errors while receiving heart surgery. Dr. Donald Berwick, a professor for pediatrics and health care policy at Harvard Medical School, states In the United States, for example, we're losing somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year basically killed by their care instead of by their disease. That's more deaths than breast cancer, more deaths than AIDS, more deaths than motor vehicle accidents. So it's a very big number, and it's surprising to most people. It's urgent. It's urgent. Twelve families who lost their babies teamed up together to find out why their babies died. They realized it was not just fate but that something terrible was happening. Soon they found that this was

Graham 3 the doctors fault. Had the hospital taken better precaution in hiring their surgeons these deaths would not have happened. This film is trustworthy and credible because it came from a credible data base, Films on Demand. It also provides information about a real case that involved medical errors and deaths that were caused by them. The film also includes doctors of high positions to support the information given. This film will be used in my research paper to support that medical hospitals do not always take the right precautions. In this case the hospital hired an inexperienced surgeon who was hired without anyone ever checking his references. This mistake may seem a world away from the simple mistake nurse Nessen made when plugging the wrong plug into the EKG monitor; however, these twelve deaths are included in the same statistics, the number of patients that die due to medical error, that the death of the four year old little girl that died from Nurse Nessens error. This source provides reasoning for better precautions taken by hospitals. In this case the hospital did not hire a surgeon fit for the job he was doing. Long, Bruce W. Safety and Inspection Control. Radiography Essentials for Limited Practice. Ed. Bruce W. Long, Eugiene D. Frank, Ruth Ann Ehrlich. 3rd edition. Vol. 1. St. Louis, Missouri: Jeanne Olsen, 2010. 459-460. Print. This source contains information about the safety and inspection precautions that must be taken in the medical field. It contains information about how equipment should be checked regularly and what may happen due to not checking equipment. It lists safety precautions that should be made before completing a task. It states one should also inspect all plugs, computers, and equipment to make sure they are functioning properly. This source is trustworthy and also credible for many reasons. It has three credible editors. It contains logical and helpful information. It has a review board. It also lists bibliographical references. It uses educational language and is organized well.

Graham 4 I am incorporating this source into my research paper because it lists the precautions that nurse Nessen should have taken. It also illuminates the fact that electric shock is very dangerous and can be prevented; Electric shock may pose a serious hazard to both patients and personnel if safety precautions are not observed (Long 460). If nurse Nessen would have Inspected equipment regularly, paying attention to cords and plugs she would not have made the mistake that was made (Long 459). She should have taken her time and inspected the cords before connecting them. She did not take the right safety precautions by just assuming IV cord was the correct plug. McCall Smith, R.A. and Merry Alan. Errors, Medicine, and the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). EBSCO. Web. 31 October 2013. Errors, Medicine, and the Law, is a book about medical errors, mistakes, accidents, and the law behind how to respond to them. I am using chapter 1, Accidents, as a source for my research paper. This chapter outlines the different types of accidents that occur in the medical field and who may be to blame for them. Some of these accidents may not be the doctor or nurses fault; however, some may directly lie under the doctor or nurses irresponsibility. This ebook is trustworthy in many different ways. It comes from a library online. The book also has examples in it to support the claims it makes on the different accidents that may occur. It has real stories and uses real names to support the information it provides. This source will be used in my essay to support the fact that doctors and nurses do not always take the right precautions before acting on a patient. The book provides one great example where Dr. Yogasakaran, an anesthesiologist from New Zealand, accidentally injects the wrong drug into a patient. If he would have checked the drug then he would have known he was injecting dopamine instead of dopram. It was ruled he was guilty of manslaughter, Yogasakaran failed to check the drug, a requirement acknowledged even by the expert called by the defense, had he checked the drug the

Graham 5 patient would not have died and the doctor would not be in this situation (McCall Smith 14). This example backs up my claim that doctors and nurses should take better precautions and protocol. Rogers, Bonnie. Nursing Occupational Injury and Stress. Encyclopedia of Nursing Research. New York: Springer Publishing Company (2011). n. pag. Credo Reference. Web. October 24 2013. This source is an article that supports the counterargument of this research paper. It is about the different hazards and also stressful events that nurses and others in the medical field face. It states that nurses *deal] with the highly complex patient care, exacerbated by traditional patterns of work organization including long or unpredictable work hours, rotating shifts, and understaffing, is very stressful (Rogers, par. 2). It also states, Health care workers are at risk for verbal, psychological, and physical violence. Violent acts occur during interactions with patients, family, visitors, coworkers, and supervisors. Working with volatile people or people under heightened stress, long wait times for service, understaffing, patients or visitors under the influence of drugs or alcohol, access to weapons, inadequate security, and poor environmental design are among the risk factors for violence. (Rogers, par. 14) This can also be very stressful to nurses. This article supports the face that they deal with a lot more than most people would think. This article is trustworthy for a few reasons. I received it off of a credible database, Credo Reference. It had many statistics listed about accidents that happen to nurses from credible organizations such as; Health Care and Social Assistance and The Bureau of Labor Statistics. It also includes studies and research to support the information it provides. This article will be used as the counterargument in my essay. It will be used to support the fact that nurses may be stressed and out of the right state of mind when doing these small tasks such as the

Graham 6 one that nurse Karen Nessen was doing. However, I will use information that refutes this idea to support the fact that this could still be prevented and it is not justified because of the stress load on nurses.