Is a Banger Tune More Important than a Baby’s Life?

One of the most jaw-dropping scary sights I’ve seen on the roads was passing a girl driving solo on Tasmania’s West Tamar highway. She had her head down, texting on her phone, with earbuds in.

In other words, she was completely sensory-isolated from what was going on around her. She might as well have been asleep at the wheel.

At the risk of sounding like an old man shouting at clouds, what the hell is it with kids these days? At my last day job, the boys on the factory floor got their knickers in a twist because us shmos in the back office sometimes listened on headphones while we worked. The message that we weren’t likely to get our hands crushed by a computer mouse if we were distracted just didn’t cut through.

To extend the Simpsons analogies, some young folk these days have the situational awareness of Homer snoozing at the control desk while Springfield goes Chernobyl. It’d be bad enough if it was their own safety they were putting at risk.

While a baby was turning blue from not getting enough oxygen, nurse Vickie Wade sat on a La-Z-Boy armchair with her laptop on her knees and her headphones in.

In the same room, an alarm had been blaring for nearly half a minute, red text on an oxygen monitor reading “apnoea.”

By the time another nurse intervened the infant’s oxygen levels were critically low at just 20% and its heart rate was below the normal range.

Now, you’d think having just escaped disaster by pure dumb luck, she’d at least be on her toes for the rest of the shift. But, no…

Despite being warned to concentrate on the infants in her care Wade was found five minutes later back in the armchair with her headphones on.

Still the lesson didn’t sink in. If the first incident was bad enough, this one was beyond belief.

This time another of Wade’s colleagues told the tribunal she was working at the NICU when an alarm began sounding to signal that another infant’s heart rate was dropping. A second alarm was then triggered to signal that oxygen levels were decreasing.

Just as she was about to intervene she saw Wade get up from an armchair in the corner of the room and turn off the alarms before sitting back down.

(Emphasis added)

Despite clearly not learning her lesson, Wade at least had enough of a guilty conscience to try and cover her arse.

Despite being asked to record the incident in red writing – an industry standard to denote a serious event – Wade was reluctant to and only recorded fragments of the incident.

On the second occasion, she also failed to chart the incident.

Then a few months later a similar incident happened, with her colleagues needing to intervene in the care of another infant in her charge.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, she’s been deregistered.

Wade was then charged with malpractice, negligence and bringing the profession into disrepute and the tribunal held a hearing into her conduct in November last year.

Today it opted to cancel her registration, censure her and order her to pay $33,000 in legal costs.

Her defence is that she was doing professional development training on her laptop. Somehow, her conduct doesn’t seem to indicate that much professionalism was developed.

The tribunal said it had no difficulty in finding Wade’s conduct amounted to negligence.

“…Infants within the NICU are amongst the most vulnerable groups a registered nurse can care for,” the tribunal said.

Otago Daily Times

Yeah, but the new Taylor Swift album just dropped.