Let me first say that I have been a nurse for less than 6 months. But this made me really nervous, and I wondered what they were thinking!
John and Jane are both nurses on my unit. We do team nursing - Jane was passing meds for half of the unit while John was performing patient care for the same patients. One patient has an elevated blood sugar. Jane took blood sugars herself and followed policy; his blood sugar was rechecked and the accountable RN (me) was notfied. I notified the doc, doc said use sliding scale per order.
I tell Jane to give Mr. XX his 8 units of sliding scale, docs orders. She says okay. A few minutes later, I found John in the med room (using Jane's key and Jane's computer) drawing up insulin. He asks me a question about the computer, so I go to look over his shoulder. On the desk I see an insulin syringe with 10 units drawn up. On the computer screen, i see he has typed "Verified with Jane Doe, LPN." (meaning he as verified the insulin with her - patient, type, amount, etc.) I ask him what he's doing in the med room, anyway. He tells me Jane is at lunch and asked him to give Mr. "YY" his insulin. But Mr. YY's blood sugar was normal. He tells me that he knew that, but had to fix it in the computer. HE HAD NOT GIVEN THE INSULIN YET, thank god. He says no big deal, Jane told him Mr. YY but she meant Mr. XX. So he was going to go give Mr. XX the insulin now, not to worry. I had to tell him to verify the order again, because Mr. XX should receive 8 units, not 10!
Long story short, he came really close to giving the WRONG patient 10 units of regular insulin.
I know now the difference between nursing school and the real world. But I would never give insulin (ESPECIALLY 10 units) to a patient when I was not the med nurse nor had I personally checked his blood sugar or looked up lab in the computer to verify that the blood sugar was indeed that elevated.
What do you think? Someone walks up to you and says, "I just checked mr. smith's blood sugar and it's 402, could you give him 10 units of insulin for me?," would you do it?
I say she shouldn't have asked him and he shouldn't have agreed.
