Yes we do, but we also give DAs discretion over when to enforce it. Given the extenuating circumstances, I don’t think it should have been enforced here.
Her employer, by not creating a culture of safety, set her up for failure.
I just don't see how in the long term this prosecution reduces medical errors and generally disagree with criminalizing mistakes; even ones such as this.
Enforcing criminal liability for homicidal negligence is how you force respect of even basic safety requirements that already existed.
I'm not arguing that hospitals aren't currently a shitshow, I'm aware I've worked in them. That doesn't excuse this nurse's complete lack of respect for the risks she took.
As I've said before, if aviation insisted on criminal punishment for pilots, we'd be far worse off. Many accidents are caused by fear of punishment. Culture of safety can only be implemented and enforced top-down. Why punish the nurses when they're not the ones responsible for what kind of culture exists at their institution?
We do sometimes punish pilots criminaly. For example one easy way to go to prison is trying to fly a plane under the influence of alcohol. (Here is an example [1])
We do not punish criminaly pilots for other kind of mistakes. For example you are unlikely to go to prison if you miscalculate the required fuel for a flight.
I don’t know the details about the nurse. Was it more like the first or more like the second?
I don't particularly care about the nurse being mentioned or the details. I'm far more concerned about the fact that nobody seems to be interested in talking about or making regulatory/process/culture changes at this hospital and/or others to ensure that it can't happen again. It's too easy to make individual nurses responsible for deaths when the actual cause is in the processes that allowed it to happen. I'm not seeing this kind of investigation. Where's the FAA/NTSB equivalent for healthcare?
That enforcement causes nurses to not want to work, as the nurses aren't the decision makers in making a culture of safety. The administrators bear that responsibility so maybe we should enforce it on them.
This nurse was the decision maker in whether she bothered to check the label on the vial for what she was injecting to the patient, and / or bothering to scan it as required before leaving them to die in terror.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but I'd like to live in the one where criminal negligence resulting in avoidable death is prosecuted.
but we literally have a law for "negligent homicide"?