So I'm not trying to step on any toes here, but I am just a little shocked at two experiences I've recently had and I want to know if this is normal or just two bad cases...
First, I worked at a small critical access hospital and we had to call a rapid response on a patient. All of the nurses rushed in and worked their magic while I watched over the floor since I was the only PCT and all of the nurses were busy. 20 minutes after the rapid was over, the physician came calmly and slowly walking down the hall and asked our nurses about the rapid. She was two months pregnant and took frequent hour long naps throughout the day and really just didn't seem at all concerned about the rapid response (if being 20 minutes late didn't say enough, IMO).
Now I've transferred to another hospital in the same network but it's a bigger hospital with all of your expected units. So last night I was watching our telemetry monitor and a patients heart rate dropped to 40, 30, 17... I alerted my nurse and we ran in. The woman was gray, not breathing, and by that time had no pulse. We called a code blue and I started compressions while the nurse got her oxygen. In a matter of minutes the code team was there and took over and once again I found myself monitoring the floor because the nurses were in the room working on this patient. About 10 minutes after the code started, the physician came walking up like he had no care in the world, stopped outside of the room and looked in for a whole maybe 8 seconds, and then left! He didn't ask a single question, walk in the room, hell, he probably didn't even know the patients name!
I've just found myself really outraged both times that the physicians did NOTHING. Is this how it normally goes? To me it just seems like doctors prescribe the meds and the nurses do, well, everything.
