Estrada v. Mijares (Summary)

NURSE-PATIENT RELATIONSHIPS

Estrada v. Mijares, No. 08-10-00290-CV (Tex. App. Feb. 20, 2013)

The Court of Appeals of Texas (“appellate court”) affirmed summary judgment in favor of a nurse practitioner being sued by the estate of a patient who died of a heart attack after being discharged from a hospital where he received pulmonary evaluation and treatment.  The estate claimed that the doctors treating the patient – and the nurse practitioner who interacted with one of those doctors – should have recognized that the patient was suffering from heart disease and taken further action to prevent his death.

The nurse practitioner moved for summary judgment on the basis that she had no nurse-patient relationship with the patient.  She provided evidence that her only involvement in his case was to inform the nurse that her collaborating physician was not on call that day and the patient should be assigned to the on-call physician, to telephone the on-call physician as a courtesy to inform him that a pulmonology consult was being requested for the patient, to provide him with certain information from the patient’s chart, and then to transcribe the on-call physician’s verbal order into the chart.

The court held that the actions of the nurse practitioner did not give rise to a nurse-patient relationship with the patient and, therefore, she could not be held liable for medical malpractice in this case.  In reaching this determination, the court rejected the estate’s claim that the nurse practitioner owed some duty to the patient merely by virtue of holding a nurse’s license (noting that such a holding would mean that nurses owed a professional nursing duty to everyone who asked for nursing care).  The court also noted that the remainder of the evidence failed to establish the existence of any relationship between the nurse and the patient. Specifically, the nurse practitioner never examined or evaluated the patient, nor attempted to diagnose or treat him; the treating physician never asked the nurse practitioner to evaluate the patient; and the treating physician countersigned his verbal order.