PSA: When weighing kids be careful about what you chart.

[MIcrunchyRN]

After a very scary learning experience on our visit to the ER with my son a few days ago, I wanted to pass this on.

Be careful to watch when weighing kids/babies etc watch your unit of measurement, take an extra second to make sure you really mean lbs or kg. If you don't it could be life threatening or mean inadequate treatment.

Our nurse who took us back (very sweet btw) weighed DS. Part of it was my fault I distracted her wanting to know my son's weight in pounds. He was 14.2lbs. She documented 14.2 kg. (Because we all know in pedi world kg is standard unit of measurement).

Well my son at discharge thank goodness the PA dropped off his scripts vs letting nurse hand them to us, because she looked at him and looked at her calculations and went oOOH wait this isn't right. Had the PA not seen him when giving his scripts he would have recieved double dosing of meds 4 times a day. And the pharmacy did'nt ask for his weight so I'm not sure it would have been caught.

So just take a moment and recheck yourself to make sure something soooo simple doesn't become a huge error.

[lunden]

that is so very true.

[kessadawn, BSN, RN]

this happened in our local hospital as well. my niece was visiting from out of state and i took her to the local ed with an ear infection. the nurse had recorded her weight wrong and she was nearly given a huge dose of antibiotics for her tiny size. unfortunately, staff didn't catch it, i did when i saw the dosage amount on the script. what if i wasn't a peds nurse, or if my sis had taken her? scary, but mistakes like that are likely i suppose when your local hospitals see kids as only maybe 5% of the patient population in the ed.

[tryingtohaveitall]

I transport pediatric patients from adult hospitals back to our children's facility. We ONLY document weights in kg, whereas it's common for the adult facilities to tell me the child's weight in lb. That's actually how I figure out if they know anything about pediatrics, if they tell me a wt. in lbs, I know they aren't familiar with pediatrics.