Hospital Patient With Pneumonia Suffers Cardiac Arrest

In most cases, a person’s normal body fluids are one percent saline. If a patient is admitted to a hospital with pneumonia and has a low blood-sodium level, an arterial blood gas test must be ordered by the hospital staff to determine the pneumonia’s effect on the patient’s blood-oxygen level. It would be a violation of the standard of care for the hospital staff to fail to administer such a test before administering a three percent saline solution. Since the nurse who administered the IV saline solution to the patient in this case did not measure the patient’s blood gas to determine how serious the pneumonia was, she had no way of knowing how dangerous it was to add sodium to the patient. The nurse did not meet the proper standard of care in this case because she did not properly evaluate the risk of giving the patient sodium. For the second nurse to have met the proper standard of care, she would have had to monitor the patient’s reaction to the three percent saline solution before his doctor arrived to check him.