Reference no: EM131476103

Male Patient Locked after Monday, April 10, 2017 12:00 AM MDT. Must post first. Scenario (based on a real Georgia case): A male patient underwent a surgical procedure at a hospital to insert a sheath into an artery of his groin. A nurse employee of the hospital was instructed to attend to the patient post-surgery to check the groin area for complications and to clean the area as necessary. While in the room alone with the patient, the patient awoke to discover the nurse rubbing his penis with both hands. The patient and his wife sued the hospital under the doctrine of respondeat superior for assault, battery, and loss of consortium. How should the court rule? Should the hospital be held vicariously liable for the acts of the nurse under the doctrine of respondeat superior? Why or why not? IMPORTANT NOTE: A lot of students are tempted to be distracted by non-issues in this scenario, so please consider the following additional information from the real-life case that you should consider carefully: This is a MALE nurse. This was NOT a routine cleaning of the area—the nurse was sexually molesting the patient. The nurse will be criminally liable for this activity, but we don’t really care about that in this discussion. So, PLEASE DON’T DEFEND THE NURSE, or talk about what consequences the nurse might face. That’s not the point of this question. Your only job is to decide whether the hospital, the nurse’s employer, can be held liable for the nurse’s actions. To answer that question, you have to decide whether the nurse was acting within the course and scope of his employment such that it would be fair to hold the hospital liable. Was this activity close enough to the nurse’s expected duties that the hospital could have foreseen something like this might happen? Or, was it so far outside the scope of what a nurse is supposed to do that it would be unfair to hold the hospital responsible? To answer that question, you have to decide whether the nurse was acting within the course and scope of his employment such that it would be fair to hold the hospital liable. Was this activity close enough to the nurse’s expected duties that the hospital could have foreseen something like this might happen? Or, was it so far outside the scope of what a nurse is supposed to do that it would be unfair to hold the hospital responsible?