The Panchiao Prosecutors' Office said yesterday it was seeking minimum jail sentences of three years for the nurses at the center of a medical blunder last year that left one new-born baby dead and six others in intensive care.
Lee Mei-yun (李美雲) and Huang Ching-hui (黃靖惠), of Taipei's Peicheng Hospital for Women and Children, were both involved in an incident on Nov. 29 last year in which seven babies were wrongly administered drugs.
Lee, 39, allegedly placed the muscle relaxant Atracurium in a refrigerator where hepatitis B vaccines were stored, leading Huang, 20, to inject it into the babies.
According to the prosecutors' office, Lee, a nurse anesthetist, asked the Taiwan branch of Abbott Laboratories Services to give Peicheng Hospital free doses of Atracurium without the hospital's permission in May last year.
A statement issued by the prosecutors' office said the pharmaceutical company gave Lee 10 bottles of Atracurium for experimental purposes.
The 10 bottles, each with a capacity of 50mg, expired on Aug. 1 last year, according to the statement.
"Lee stored the 10 bottles in a refrigerator meant for babies' vaccines and did not mark them," said the statement.
During questioning by prosecutors, Lee "played many verbal tricks and showed no remorse for her mistake," the statement said.
Huang, on the other hand, did not carefully read the labels on the bottles before injecting them into the babies, according to the statement.
Prosecutors are looking to secure a jail term of three years and six months for Huang and a lighter sentence of three years for Lee.
One baby died and six suffered heart failure, lung failure and other breathing difficulties because of Huang's mistake, said the statement.
The victims' parents also accused Peicheng Hospital director Hsu Mu-chan (徐木泉), Dr. Chen Jung-chun (陳榮村) and head nurse Liang Chia-hsin (梁嘉欣) of negligence, but the prosecutors' office announced it would not be suing them.
"The three members of staff at the hospital failed to monitor the hospital properly," said the prosecutors' office's spokesman Tseng Chun-che (曾俊哲), adding that this amounted to administration negligence.
"But their negligence did not directly lead to the medical error. In other words, they did not break the criminal code," Tseng said.
The case will be sent to the Panchiao District Court for further proceedings.
After the tragedy, the Department of Health banned the hospital from administering vaccine injections and dispatched a medical team to the hospital to take over the job.
Eleven days after the tragedy in Peicheng Hospital, another prescription error occurred in Pingtung County that resulted in the death of one child and the injuring of 10 others.
The two foul-ups forced the department to form new hospital assessment teams and review hospitals' error-reporting systems.
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