Originally Posted by unikuelady
During my OR rotation in nursing school, I observed the surgeon all gowned and gloved-in the operating room- open up a newspaper
on top of the a-w-a-k-e patient
reading out loud the want ads for a car. This went on for 10 minutes. No one in operating room said anything. When the patient was anesthetized...he proceded to operate...no changing gloves etc. he also dropped an instrument on the floor and the scrub nurse picked it up-rinsed it in the basin of irrigation fluid and handed it back to the surgeon. To top it off....the fluid in the basin was used to irrigate the wound when surgery completed! Yes the patient lived.....after several weeks in the hospital with massive infections.
Gee..I wonder how the patient got the infections?
Must have been those nasty nurses not washing their hands.
Isn't that always the "determined cause". Never mind docs going patient to patient with ties and labcoats flapping in the breeze. Some of them never wash their hands. (Gross!) They just sort of wave their hands around close to running water. When wounds get infected it's always the nurses who get blamed - "They don't wash their hands, they break sterile technique when changing the dressing." Crap! That wound is already infected when we get the patient.
Don't even get me started on ventilator-acquired pneumonia. We get nailed with that one too. "Those nurses don't suction often enough, they don't provide mouth care often enough". Yeah right. Picture this: code is called, patient needs an airway. In swaggers the anesthesiologist to intubate. MDA places the laryngoscope and pulls the ETT out of its sterile container and attempts to place it in the patient's sterile airway. Oops - missed, tubed the esophagus. Patient vomits. MDA withdraws tube - wipes it off on either his pants or the bed and takes this same ETT (now covered with emesis, HCL, and whatever little germies were lurking around on whatever the tube was wiped on - not to mention any emesis that may have gotten INSIDE the tube) and places it in what
was a sterile airway. Patient is bagged then put on vent. We'll say this code is successful. Fast forward a couple of days. CXR is done. Of course, half the lung fields are whited out. What happened?? Must have been those lazy nurses not suctioning and not doing mouth care...
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