A nurse has had her medical registration terminated after a tribunal found she had disconnected a patient’s heart monitor alarm during a FaceTime call before he died.
Geraldine Lumbo Dizon turned off the sound for the 85-year-old’s monitor during a night shift at Nepean Private Hospital in Sydney‘s west on July 29, 2021, the NSW Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal has found.
Ms Dizon also failed to inform doctors that the same patient had registered irregular heart rhythm prior to the incident.
The former nurse has now been found guilty of professional misconduct and unsatisfactory professional conduct.
The tribunal found that Ms Dizon should have provided treatment to the male patient, who had renal and heart failure, which she neglected to do while on the video call with her family.
Geraldine Lumbo Dizon turned off a patient’s heart monitor sound system during a FaceTime call on July 16, 2021 (stock image pictured)
Geraldine Lumbo Dizon has had her nursing registration suspended after her fatal shift at Nepean Private Hospital (pictured)
Ms Dizon then forgot to plug the alarm system back in after her shift, which the tribunal said led other staff to miss key alarms indicating his deteriorating condition.
‘At 7:07am on 30 July 2021, the heart monitor showed Patient A was bradycardia [slow heartbeat],’ the tribunal’s decision read.
‘Nursing and medical staff could not hear the alarm because the telemetry alarm speakers were still disconnected.’
The ‘telemetry alarm speakers’ connect to the monitoring device for patients, five of which, including the 85-year-old man, were disconnected during Ms Dizon’s shift.
Ms Dizon explained during a tribunal hearing that she had simply turned off the sound to avoid confusion for other patients who were mistaking it for the sound of a doorbell.
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Seven minutes after the mute alert was detected at 7:07am, the man suffered cardiac failure – which also prompted a soundless alarm.
He was found unresponsive in his bed by staff at 7:20am.
It was also found that despite the fact that Ms Dizon was supposed to check the patient every six hours, CCTV showed that she had only done so once during her 10-hour shift.
The tribunal said Ms Dizon was on her phone 15 minutes before the man’s heartbeat began to slow down, and that she had spent more than 66 minutes on the FaceTime call.
While the sound was muted, the patient’s monitor attempted to alert staff to a slowing heartbeat and subsequent cardiac arrest before they were found deceased
Ms Dizon said that her phone use was ‘not conscious’ and that she was checking on her family in the Philippines at the time.
She also said that she didn’t tell other staff about the heart rhythm because she wasn’t ‘good at ECG reading’.
The former nurse did not attend any hearings with the Health Care Complaints Commission, stating that she had already resigned from nursing.
The commission went on to find that she had broken Australian nurse safety protocols after working 70 hours a week between January and July 2021.
Ms Dizon admitted that she’d been working four, 10-hour night shifts a week at Nepean Public Hospital, as well as three 10-hour shifts at Nepean Private, but said she hadn’t been fatigued at the time.
After training in the Philippines in 1997 and gaining her registration as an Australian nurse in 2006, Ms Dizon had her registration suspended in August 2021 – one month after her 85-year-old patient died.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Healthscope Corporate, which runs Nepean Private Hospital, for comment.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
