There’s “duty of care” (where you are obligated to provide aid, usually due to your profession) and separately there’s “Good Samaritan” laws (you don’t have to help, but you are qualified to do so and protected from any results). The details on both of these vary tremendously based on jurisdiction and circumstance, particularly the Good Samaritan requirements.
Yup, but in this case duty of care is more important overall since the sister is an RN. It’s the difference between a possible lawsuit and criminal charges (depending on location) if anyone finds out she didn’t render aid.
You know what’s fucked up? My state at one point was set up so that if you were CPR certified, you weren’t covered for the usual broken ribs kind of injuries. But if you weren’t, you were clear. So a lot of people in my job (nurse’s assistant) just skipped CPR certification entirely. It meant that we weren’t required to do it at all, but that if we did, we were legally covered under good Samaritan.
They fixed it eventually, but it was fucking annoying.
Even worse, if you had a patient that didn’t want resuscitation, but hadn’t gotten an advanced directive or dnr done before becoming unable to, if you were certified, you had to do it. But if you weren’t, you weren’t allowed to. So, again, NAs had to decide what level of exposure they would tolerate vs what ethical boundaries they had, and fit it against the impossible to predict needs of future patients.
RNs, however, were required to keep a CPR cert (though it later got fixed so that an RN was automatically considered certfied).
Some of the labyrinthine bullshit around emergencies is just stupid.
There’s “duty of care” (where you are obligated to provide aid, usually due to your profession) and separately there’s “Good Samaritan” laws (you don’t have to help, but you are qualified to do so and protected from any results). The details on both of these vary tremendously based on jurisdiction and circumstance, particularly the Good Samaritan requirements.
Yup, but in this case duty of care is more important overall since the sister is an RN. It’s the difference between a possible lawsuit and criminal charges (depending on location) if anyone finds out she didn’t render aid.
You know what’s fucked up? My state at one point was set up so that if you were CPR certified, you weren’t covered for the usual broken ribs kind of injuries. But if you weren’t, you were clear. So a lot of people in my job (nurse’s assistant) just skipped CPR certification entirely. It meant that we weren’t required to do it at all, but that if we did, we were legally covered under good Samaritan.
They fixed it eventually, but it was fucking annoying.
Even worse, if you had a patient that didn’t want resuscitation, but hadn’t gotten an advanced directive or dnr done before becoming unable to, if you were certified, you had to do it. But if you weren’t, you weren’t allowed to. So, again, NAs had to decide what level of exposure they would tolerate vs what ethical boundaries they had, and fit it against the impossible to predict needs of future patients.
RNs, however, were required to keep a CPR cert (though it later got fixed so that an RN was automatically considered certfied).
Some of the labyrinthine bullshit around emergencies is just stupid.