Imagine answering the phone and the first words you hear are “Your nonprofit made a mistake and now our mother is dead.”
Those simple words have the power to bring everything you and your nonprofit’s team have built to a screeching halt — so when your nonprofit’s mission includes measuring and administering people’s medication, you simply can’t afford to risk errors, oversights, or mistakes.
Whether it’s too much medication, too little medication, or the wrong medication, a dosage error can have serious, and even lethal, consequences.
Not only will a family be grieving the loss of a loved one, but a wrongful death lawsuit stemming from a dosage error can do irreparable harm a nonprofit — which is why you’ve got to do everything you can to have plans, procedures, and practices in place to help prevent that from happening.
Let’s discuss a scenario involving a nonprofit accused of making a medicine dosage error and discuss some steps and practices your nonprofit might consider adopting to help protect yourself in a similar situation.
The Nonprofit:
A nonprofit provided at-home healthcare to elderly patients, disabled persons, and those recovering from injuries. The nonprofit’s services included administering medications that had been prescribed by outside medical providers.
The Incident:
One day, while treating an elderly woman who was a new client, one of the nonprofit’s aides misunderstood the doctor’s prescription and, instead of seeking clarification, inadvertently gave the client an incorrect dosage of their medication, which sadly resulted in the woman’s death.
The Legal Action:
When the coroner’s report identified the client’s cause of death as being an improper dosage of medication, the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the doctor, the nonprofit, and the aide.
The Coverage:
As soon as the nonprofit was made aware of the lawsuit, they alerted their broker, who began the process of making a claim on the nonprofit’s Social Services Professional (SSP) coverage with Nonprofits Insurance Alliance (NIA).
NIA staff reviewed the claim and provided the nonprofit and the aide with legal defense.
The Result:
Due in part to the fact that the prescribing doctor was named as a defendant along with the nonprofit and the aide, this case took a long time to resolve.
In the end, however, the defense counsel that NIA provided for the member nonprofit determined that, considering the circumstances around the dosage error, a judge and jury would be likely to assign at least some fault to the nonprofit and the aide.
As a result, the legal counsel worked with the family’s legal representatives to reach an appropriate settlement for the claim, which NIA paid.
What Did the Nonprofit Do Right?
Firstly, the nonprofit notified their broker and activated the claims process as soon as they became aware of the allegations against the organization and the aide.
However, the positives pretty much end there, as a lack of preventative practices, procedures, and safeguards resulted in a mistake that cost a person their life, took a loved one from a bereaved family, and permanently stained the nonprofit’s reputation — none of which needed to happen.
How Can Your Nonprofit Avoid This?
When your nonprofit’s mission includes working in any facet of health care, it should go without saying that making a mistake that causes someone’s death is the last outcome you want.
If someone dies in your nonprofit’s care, a wrongful death lawsuit by the deceased person’s family is a very likely possibility.
In that situation, every part of your nonprofit will be under investigation and intense public scrutiny — including all your preventive procedures, recordkeeping practices, and staff training and conduct policies.
Now is the time to ask yourself: Do you have those? And, if you do, will they hold up to outside scrutiny?
Protecting your nonprofit and your team against these situations means you need to be able to do two things:
1. Prevent dosage mistakes from happening in the first place.
Any time that a patient has a new medication, or you’re getting familiar with a new client’s medication regimen — staff must be instructed to seek confirmation from the prescribing medical professional if anything is not completely clear.
When it comes to medicine, there are a lot of things that can go wrong which are outside your nonprofit’s control: Doctors can make mistakes, overworked medical staff can mistype dosage amounts in medical orders, the printer could smudge the label at the pharmacy, and the list goes on.
The point is, if there’s any doubt or questions about a medication dosage — if the instructions aren’t crystal clear or if the amount seems unusually large or small — you and your team should never, ever try to guess.
Your nonprofit should have practices in place that enable you to quickly contact the client’s physician to confirm their medication, the correct dosage, the frequency it should be administered, and any other instructions.
Don’t worry about pestering the doctor, it’s more important to take the time to double check and make sure you’re getting it right than to risk anyone’s life.
This will help you be confident that the clients are getting the correct medication, and if the worst should still happen, you can rest assured that you did your part of things correctly.
2. Be able to prove — in court, if necessary — that you and your team did everything to ensure that the medications and dosages being administered were correct.
When someone accuses your nonprofit of causing someone’s death by making an error in their medication, you never want to end up in court without records and documentation to defend yourself.
When someone dies in your nonprofit’s care despite your following best practices, it is essential that you are able to prove in court that you fulfilled all requirements in adherence to the law, and that you had reasonable preventative measures in place to prevent this tragedy.
That’s why, for a nonprofit, there is no such thing as too much documentation.
Document everything — your processes, your procedures, times, dates, decisions, every client check-in, all contact with the client’s doctor, every prescription change, and more.
Keeping notes and records can seem like a hassle — one more step for an already overworked staff — but when your nonprofit is accused of wrongdoing, accurate records are essential to enable a fruitful defense and resolution of the issue.
Keeping good records not only helps your team stay more organized, but if your nonprofit ever needs to defend itself in court, your records can serve as proof that:
- You operated responsibly and in good faith
- Your policies and procedures complied with the law
- Your team was fully trained and had all appropriate certifications and credentials
- Rules, policies, and procedures were consistently and equitably applied
- Everyone understood their responsibilities and duties
- Staff acted and responded appropriately
Strong recordkeeping practices can provide you with a mountain of evidence to present in court, which can help put you in a much stronger position to defend your mission and your good name.
None of that will bring a deceased person back to their family, of course, but if you can prove that your nonprofit operated in good faith, your team did its due diligence, and that you had procedures in place to confirm your clients’ medications and proper dosage amounts — and then kept records of doing all of it — then your organization might be able to better weather that storm.
Ideally, of course, confirming the medication and dosage amounts ahead of time will prevent these types of accidental deaths in the first place, but if there is an error and the client does unfortunately pass away, it’s definitely better if you can prove it was the prescribing doctor’s mistake and not yours.
Conclusion
No one wants to be the reason that a family no longer has their loved one. This is especially true for nonprofits, with a mission to serve their community.
When your nonprofit’s mission includes administering medication to sick, disabled, or elderly people, you have a responsibility to get it right — not only does your mission depend on it, people’s lives also count on it.
Strong preventive practices, such as confirming medication and dosage amounts with the prescribing doctor when they are ordered — and keeping detailed records that prove you did that — can help your nonprofit be confident that you’re doing right by your clients, prevent tragedies before they can occur, and protect your mission in case they do happen.
