{"id":13530,"date":"2026-05-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13530"},"modified":"2026-05-27T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T09:00:00","slug":"nurse-convicted-in-patients-death-turns-fatal-drug-error-into-a-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13530","title":{"rendered":"Nurse Convicted in Patient\u2019s Death Turns Fatal Drug Error Into a Cautionary Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"
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LISTEN: After a guilty verdict for negligent homicide, a former nurse has found receptive audiences on the speaking circuit. She says she hopes her story can help shed light on problems in the healthcare industry.<\/em><\/p>\n

When RaDonda Vaught got her first speaking request, it had been a year since that day in a Nashville courtroom, when she listened as a jury read her guilty verdict for negligent homicide and neglect of an impaired adult.<\/p>\n

That was in 2022. Vaught was sentenced to three years of probation for administering the wrong medication and killing a patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2017.<\/p>\n

She also lost her nursing license. So Vaught became a full-time farmer. She and her husband live on a small sheep farm<\/a> in Bethpage, Tennessee, tucked in the rolling hills north of Nashville. They sell eggs at farmers markets on Saturdays and supply meat to local butchers and restaurants.<\/p>\n

The controversial trial had been national news, and now the healthcare industry wanted to hear from her. So Vaught started giving speeches across the country about what happened that day in the hospital. She says her hope is that others in an industry increasingly turning toward automation and artificial intelligence can understand the multiple factors that contributed to the deadly medication mix-up.<\/p>\n

She says she\u2019s painfully aware that it could appear she is profiting from a tragedy of her making.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t something that I wanted to happen. It wasn\u2019t even something that was on my radar to think about,\u201d Vaught said of the speaking requests. \u201cThe opportunities just kept presenting themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speaking engagements provide her with an income that replaces what she made as a nurse, a career she can never return to. Last year, she told her story more than 20 times, and she is paid $5,000 to $10,000 per event.<\/p>\n

But her speaking engagements also provoke criticism. After she told her story at length on Nashville Public Radio\u2019s WPLN News<\/a> in March, a retired nurse, Gary Wood, fired off an email to the station. Such medical mistakes could never be justified, he wrote: \u201cIt put a stain on a proud and dedicated profession.\u201d Yet, Vaught often finds a receptive audience, eager to hear her perspective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen her a few times now in person, and I\u2019ve never seen RaDonda tell the story and not be upset,\u201d said Charlene Verga, who invited Vaught to be the closing speaker at the Massachusetts Nurses Association<\/a>\u2019s clinical nursing conference last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cRaDonda speaking the way she is, she literally is transforming her mistake into a teaching moment,\u201d Verga said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t even something that was on my radar to think about,\u201d RaDonda Vaught said of her speaking engagements. \u201cThe opportunities just kept presenting themselves.\u201d (Blake Farmer\/WPLN News)<\/p>\n

Vaught expected the speaking gigs would be short-lived. But the reviews were good. And she realized she was comfortable in front of a crowd.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was emotionally overwhelming and a little cathartic, but I\u2019m going to tell you, you could have heard a pin drop,\u201d Vaught said of her first talk in 2023 to hundreds of industrial professionals at a meeting organized by TapRooT<\/a>, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based company that specializes in root cause analysis.<\/p>\n

Vaught has turned her story into a cautionary tale that she hopes will make hospitals safer. She says that humans are going to make mistakes and that systems in healthcare need to be designed so people can fail without killing someone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole mockery of our healthcare system \u2014 people feeling afraid to talk about mistakes and come forward when they happen \u2014 it doesn\u2019t save people. It kills them,\u201d she said in a presentation to the California Hospital Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Onstage, Vaught confronts the painful and embarrassing details directly, often choking back tears when talking about the patient who died \u2014 Charlene Murphey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just one mistake that led to the death.<\/p>\n

A doctor had ordered a sedative called Versed to settle Murphey\u2019s claustrophobia before an imaging procedure. Vaught typed \u201cVE\u201d into the search function to retrieve Versed from the electronic medicine cabinet. When it did not dispense, she overrode the system.<\/p>\n

In Vaught\u2019s trial, fellow nurses testified that during a time when the hospital was upgrading some of its technology, they could use overrides to bypass delays.<\/p>\n

When Vaught took that step, one of the drug options available was vecuronium, a powerful paralytic. Vaught overlooked multiple warnings about the danger of vecuronium, including on the bottle\u2019s cap, which said \u201cWarning: Paralyzing Agent,\u201d according to court records.<\/p>\n

Vaught administered the vecuronium and also left the patient alone.<\/p>\n

While not disputing most of the facts, Vaught pleaded not guilty to all charges, claiming there were other factors, such as a new electronic health record system that was causing widespread problems in the hospital. A lead investigator for the prosecution testified in the criminal case that Vanderbilt also shared some responsibility.<\/p>\n

As previously reported by KFF Health News<\/a>, Vanderbilt did not initially report the error to regulators as required and told the medical examiner that the patient died of natural causes. The medical center fired Vaught and negotiated a settlement with the Murpheys that keeps the family from talking publicly about her death.<\/p>\n

Once the case became a criminal matter, though, the details entered the public record. Vaught is not bound by the hospital\u2019s settlement, allowing her to share whatever she feels comfortable sharing with whomever she wants.<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt spokesperson Craig Boerner declined to comment about Vaught\u2019s public speaking or what the medical center learned from the incident.<\/p>\n

Vaught has turned her story into a cautionary tale that she hopes will make hospitals safer. (Blake Farmer\/WPLN News)<\/p>\n

The two largest companies that make drug-dispensing cabinets, Omnicell and BD, have updated their machines<\/a> with recommendations from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices<\/a>. One update requires the user to type in more than the first two letters of a medication to pull up a list of options.<\/p>\n

Many hospitals also tweaked their drug administration protocols, such as by requiring wristband barcode checks anywhere a patient gets medication in a hospital.<\/p>\n

Reacting to Vaught\u2019s case, the state legislature in Kentucky passed a bill<\/a> that became law in 2024 providing immunity for on-the-job healthcare mistakes. Support wasn\u2019t just bipartisan. It was unanimous.<\/p>\n

Nursing consultant Matthew Garvey<\/a> went to nursing school with Vaught and has worked directly with her as a nurse. Vaught\u2019s criminal case inspired him to go to law school, he said. He now plans to help other nurses defend themselves in similar cases, even though he sees the need for accountability.<\/p>\n

If it had been up to him, he also would have fired Vaught, Garvey said. He also thinks that the Tennessee Board of Nursing should have taken action immediately. Only after the patient\u2019s death escalated to a criminal matter did the board revisit the case and revoke Vaught\u2019s license.<\/p>\n

But the defendants\u2019 side of the story is rarely ever told, Garvey said, because they are advised by their lawyers not to talk.<\/p>\n

Now that she has a platform, Garvey said, it\u2019s therapeutic for Vaught. Her talks resonate with anxious nurses across the nation, he said, and promote a much-needed discussion about collective responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t change what happened. We can only change what we do moving forward,\u201d Garvey said. \u201cHaving the individual who can tell you the play-by-play \u2014 that was there when it actually happened \u2014 is incredibly valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article is from a partnership that includes\u00a0Nashville Public Radio<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0NPR<\/a>, and KFF Health News.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/kffhealthnews.org\/syndicate\/nurse-drug-errors-hospital-safety-radonda-vought-tennessee\/”>article<\/a&gt<\/a>; first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/kffhealthnews.org”>KFF<\/a> Health News<\/a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/”>Creative<\/a> Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<img src=”https:\/\/kffhealthnews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2023\/04\/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot<\/a>; style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”><\/p>\n

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LISTEN: After a guilty verdict for negligent homicide, a former nurse has found receptive audiences on the speaking circuit. She says she hopes her story can help shed light on problems in the healthcare industry. When RaDonda Vaught got her first speaking request, it had been a year since that day in a Nashville courtroom,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13530"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}