Ideally, nurses aren't working 12- and 14-hour shifts back-to-back because of critical understaffing and/or cost-cutting, and aren't responsible for about 2-3 times as many patients per nurse as they ought to be. Ideally, said nurses aren't fatigued and stressed to hell and gone. Ideally, no one ever makes a mistake when they are exhausted, rushed, and stressed. Ideally, if anyone makes a mistake, it will be completely innocuous and won't kill or maim anyone or cause massive property damage.
Unfortunately, I don't live in that ideal world, and neither do any nurses I know of. That doesn't make them "purely incompetent"; it makes them human beings living in the real world.
Based on this NY Times article, the current state of things in the medical devices world is fucking retarded! In the electronics world, we carefully make incompatible devices with incompatible plugs, and/or use color coding for similar plugs (keyboard/mouse and microphone/speaker/line-in come to mind). Apparently making sure customers don't fry their home electronics is more important than making sure patients don't die. Apparently the medical devices industry hasn't heard of something like "industry standards". How bloody hard is it to get together with your industry standards organization and publish a standard that says all IV tubes have a plug type A, all air tubes have plug type B, etc?? This is basic industrial and safety engineering--it's not rocket science.