Nurses sacked after child dies from wrong medicine in China
- Five-year-old boy with viral encephalitis dies the same day as he is given an antibiotic rather than a drug to ease pressure on his brain
Two nurses have been sacked in eastern China after a five-year-old boy died within hours of being given the wrong medication last month.
Zhu Chenyi was admitted with a high fever to the Yixing People’s Hospital in Yixing, Jiangsu province, in September and was diagnosed with viral encephalitis with psychotic symptoms, Shanghai-based news site Thepaper.cn reported on Monday.
Instead of giving him medication to ease pressure in the brain as prescribed, the nurses administered an intravenous drip with an antibiotic on September 8, the report said.
Doctors ordered a CAT scan when Chenyi soon appeared to be in discomfort but it did not reveal any abnormalities.
The hospital discharged him to be transferred to the Children’s Hospital Affiliated to Suzhou University that afternoon, but he went into cardiac arrest on the way. Despite the father’s successful efforts to revive the boy and send him to a closer hospital, the child died that night.
An initial investigation by the Yixing Health Commission determined that two duty nurses did not follow procedure and administered the wrong medicine.