Big mistakes?

I was curious....biggest mistake made in clinicals by students? Any near-misses that could have been fatal?

[bluesky, BSN, RN]

Well.... I only did this once but... my biggest mistake was that I left a tourniquet on one of my pts for about 10 minutes after drawing blood for a culture. OOOOOOOPS. My preceptor actually caught the mistake, I appologized profusely after assessing her arm and hand and my preceptor said "bet you'll never do THAT again!" Boy was she right!

[shape0fmyheart]

My patient was supposed to get 75mg of a BP medication (I forget which one), which only came in 50mg tablets. Well, when I went into the room I (and my instructor) forgot to break the second one in half, so the woman got 100mg. I was panicking. My instructor was also the nurse manager of the floor so she sprung into action, called the doc, who said it was nothing to worry about (whew). Still, the next clinical day when the woman was having heart trouble all I could think was that it was my fault (they reassured me over and over again it wasn't). Now I check and re-check meds 500000000 times.