Dangerous nurses

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Have any of you ever worked with a nurse you would classify as dangerous ---- dangerous as a nurse and as a person?

Specializes in ICU/Critical Care.
hmmm,one I think was like a regular insulin you checked on the sliding scale,the other one was long lasting I think...however I remeber that this patients sugar levels wasnt that alarmingly high and even my instructor was surprised that she just brushed if off and said to give it and follow like a blind mule the doctors order...

Some patients are that brittle. I had a patient who was being covered for blood glucoses of 60-90 with 4 units of insulin. I thought that was nuts.

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a patient had a high potassium level and the doctor ordered kayexelate but she did not d/c the k+ and for two days the nurses gave the patient both the potassium and the kayexelate

i have worked with so many lazy, incompetent nurses i have lost count...tptb believe that a warm body with a license is the answer to all their problems

Ok I like your thinking but maybe there is a underlying cause of why there are so many dangerous nurses,perhaps some of the instructors are in the blame game here....there are many nursing isntructors who dont tolerate when the student ask a question concering a patient lab value,med,procedure etc..they expect us to be perfect...I dont even bother to ask questions anymore mainly to the fact that I received rude replies consisting of such lovely supportive words as "You should know this","Why are you asking that",Excuse me I'm not perfect,I'm here to learn and I dont remember everything I learned a year ago...and I dont practice my skills in the hospital everyday,nor havent I been a nursing instructor for the last 10 years....I love asking question and I never think I know everything because that would be a serious lie however I become discourage by nursing instructors for some time now,I hope that doesnt make me a dangerous nursing student.

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The only type of nurses that I fear are the ones that are too lazy and unmotivated to learn the correct way to do things.Or are too lazy to do their job.

At seven months pregnant I was in a car accident. I was brought to the local hospital and placed on the OB floor. The nurse came in and asked about my symptoms. I had a burning feeling under my right breast, my bottom hurt and I was having contractions. The fetal monitor showed some contractions and a slightly reduced fetal heartrate. I was never undressed. I was allowed to get up and go the bathroom myself. The doctor NEVER came to examine me. The hospital staff failed to follow their own policy. And had been written up before for their slapdash on call system! The nurse/doc refused to call my Perinatologist! Even the paramedic that came up to the room to fill out his paperwork was astonished when the nurse said the doctor wasn't going to come in and check me, even though he was at the nurses desk! The medic even volunteered to take my husband and I to our specialist! Here I was knowing that something wasn't right, and I was dealing with a nurse who was obviously refusing to do her job, and a doctor who had momentarily lost his flea flippin mind! Finally we walked out of the hospital and drove to my specialists office downtown. Lo and behold, my placenta was tearing, there was bleeding occuring, I was in labor and I was dialating! I had to be given Mag Sulf and given steriods to rapidly develop my son's heartbeat. Had I just gone home I don't think my little boy would be here today.

I was contacted by the state because someone had reported the doctor and nurse for an EMTALA violation. I was able to successfully sue the hospital.

So yes, there are some nurses and doctors that are very dangerous to patients. Bad apples in every bunch.

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Specializes in ICU/Critical Care.

ECK, I'm really sorry that happened to you. Some of the things I see at work astonish me. Trust me, if I walked in and my father's colostomy stoma was blue and had low to no urine output for four hours and had not been reported to the doctor, the nurse would be up against the wall. This type of situation happened, not the nurse against the wall part but the patient part. This nurse was reported to management, nothing was ever done and it's frustrating. This same nurse told me the other night when I came on, "Oh, the patient has been incontinent all day"...well, lucky for me, I had the best CNA working with me that night who told me that patient was able to get herself on the bedpan and wasn't incontinent the night before. I was horrified that this nurse would just let the patient wet the bed. I wrote her up.

Update: I just sent a long email to my manager regarding the patient that was allowed to pee on herself all day. I also made it aware in my email that the patient's mouth looked like it had lacked oral care and had mucous caked on the roof of the patients mouth and that the patient's tongue was dry and scaley.

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Specializes in M/S, Travel Nursing, Pulmonary.

I worked with an agency nurse once who scared me when I was charge nurse. I had a pt. assignment and did everything I could to orient her to the unit before moving on to my duties.

Before the end of the shift, after all her meds had been given, she started talking about something a pt. did. After hearing the story, I was beside myself. The person she was talking about would not do such a thing (she was claiming a pt. got fresh with her, but used the name of a confused pt. who did not speak and certainly was not able to put together one liners like she was describing).

She went on telling me about her day as she documented. Then she asked me to "review" her documentation (she was a very nervous nurse). As I read her documentation, I knew some of her pts. and everything was out of whack. Pt. A's JP drain was on pt B's documentation, pt. C's common pain complaint was on pt. D and on and on.

Finally, I asked her to name and point out the pt.'s to me. She had them completely mixed up in her mind. I hesitated, but had to ask......."Did you check arm bands before giving medications?"

She said yes and went on giving me the wrong name for the wrong pt.

I checked, and half her pt's didnt have arm bands. It was a brain injury unit, so they took them off frequently. IDK when the came off, but...........eh, my intuition is that they were not on while she was doing meds.

I documented the incident, called the DON at home and informed her and called each pt's doctor. What a mess. The midnight shift had to be on high alert for reactions to meds. No one had a reaction thank god.

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Specializes in Cardiac Telemetry, ED.
Ok I like your thinking but maybe there is a underlying cause of why there are so many dangerous nurses,perhaps some of the instructors are in the blame game here....there are many nursing isntructors who dont tolerate when the student ask a question concering a patient lab value,med,procedure etc..they expect us to be perfect...I dont even bother to ask questions anymore mainly to the fact that I received rude replies consisting of such lovely supportive words as "You should know this","Why are you asking that",Excuse me I'm not perfect,I'm here to learn and I dont remember everything I learned a year ago...and I dont practice my skills in the hospital everyday,nor havent I been a nursing instructor for the last 10 years....I love asking question and I never think I know everything because that would be a serious lie however I become discourage by nursing instructors for some time now,I hope that doesnt make me a dangerous nursing student.

If you are getting into the habit of not asking questions as a student because you don't like the responses you get, then yes, you will be a dangerous nurse if you take that same attitude with you once you are working. As a nurse, you really will need to be able to handle criticism without getting defensive.

Maybe your clinical instructor has a point when she says you should already know something, or maybe she's being overly critical. We cannot possibly know just by hearing one side of the story.

In either case, you can prevent a lot of that simply by being extremely well prepared for clinical, before you even set foot on the floor. Anticipate the kinds of questions your instructor might ask you, and do your homework ahead of time.

As far as dangerous nurses, I can't think of anything as terribly blatant as some of these examples, but I did follow a nurse once who ran diltiazem all day with no vital signs flow sheet, so I had no idea what the patient's BP & HR trend was by the time I took over, and I followed one once who didn't bother to flush the PIV on a patient with a recent history of V-Fib arrest X3, who was a full code, and another time, a different patient but similar situation where the PICC line was occluded. Silly me, to think the necessity of IV access is a given for cardiac patients. :clown:

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Specializes in private duty/home health, med/surg.
hmmm,one I think was like a regular insulin you checked on the sliding scale,the other one was long lasting I think...however I remeber that this patients sugar levels wasnt that alarmingly high and even my instructor was surprised that she just brushed if off and said to give it and follow like a blind mule the doctors order...

Why did you assume that the nurse "just brushed if off and said to give it and follow like a blind mule the doctors order..."? Perhaps she knows more about the patient's history than you do. You could have asked her to explain to you why she thought that dose was appropriate. Some people are really that insulin resistant that we are covering them with what seems like unusually high amounts of insulin for sugars that aren't high.

I've had a patient that received 140 units of Lantus plus she'd receive 20+ units shorter-acting insulin with meals even when her sugar was in the 90's. She told me that she'd actually had to argue with nurses who didn't want to cover her with that much insulin. She knew from experience that if she didn't get that much her sugars would get out of control. Remember, it is better to keep the sugar in an appropriate range than to react to a sugar that is "alarmingly high."

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Specializes in Telemetry & Obs.
Why did you assume that the nurse "just brushed if off and said to give it and follow like a blind mule the doctors order..."? Perhaps she knows more about the patient's history than you do. You could have asked her to explain to you why she thought that dose was appropriate. Some people are really that insulin resistant that we are covering them with what seems like unusually high amounts of insulin for sugars that aren't high.

I've had a patient that received 140 units of Lantus plus she'd receive 20+ units shorter-acting insulin with meals even when her sugar was in the 90's. She told me that she'd actually had to argue with nurses who didn't want to cover her with that much insulin. She knew from experience that if she didn't get that much her sugars would get out of control. Remember, it is better to keep the sugar in an appropriate range than to react to a sugar that is "alarmingly high."

My SSI starts at 14 units of Humalog if my BG is from 110-150 and goes up proportionately. As I mentioned previously I routinely take 20 units before each meal. I don't even want to talk about the weekend after I'd received steroids with my chemo :( I am very insulin resistant and have been since my CA diagnosis (hopefully things will change)

Personally, I think it's crazy to assume the RN didn't know her patient's history and was "blindly following MDs orders like a mule". Maybe *she* was a little tired of asinine questions about things any nursing student should know as well.

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

I worked with another RN who was making up glucometer results and writing them onto the MARs. The way I learned this was when I went in to take a glucometer reading on a patient. The patient asked me why I was doing this. After I explained it to her she told me that Nurse xxx never did this. That sent me checking the MAR and the memory of the glucometer. I was sickened. I couldn't believe that a nurse would do something like this. We watched and also found that this same nurse was also charting but not giving medications to the confused people in the Alzheimer's unit (this was in a nursing home). It was so widespread that the DON called in the pharmacy which did a physical count of her medicine cart before and after the last shift that she ever worked for this facility. From what I heard the DON and pharmacy were shocked at what they found she didn't do include falsify yet again the blood sugar readings. Apparently, she wasn't giving any medications at all to the Alzheimer patients! They allowed her to quit rather than fire her. Because of confidentiality reasons I do not know if she was ever reported to the board of nursing. I watched the BON reports for awhile, but never saw her name listed.

I saw a lot of bad nursing when I worked in nursing homes. Over 30 years ago I witnessed a charge nurse on the 3-11 shift who would pass all the meds at one time during the 5pm med pass and then sit down the remainder of the time and talk on the phone with friends. I heard her say she wanted those patients asleep so they wouldn't be bothering her which was her reasoning for giving them their "sleepers" (sedative-hypnotics) so early. When I worked the night shift after her many of the patients were wide awake by 3am and ready to start the day. She was a nasty, nasty lady who was very mean to her aides as well. It's probably because of people like her that the laws for nursing homes have been enacted.

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Why did you assume that the nurse "just brushed if off and said to give it and follow like a blind mule the doctors order..."? Perhaps she knows more about the patient's history than you do. You could have asked her to explain to you why she thought that dose was appropriate. Some people are really that insulin resistant that we are covering them with what seems like unusually high amounts of insulin for sugars that aren't high.

I've had a patient that received 140 units of Lantus plus she'd receive 20+ units shorter-acting insulin with meals even when her sugar was in the 90's. She told me that she'd actually had to argue with nurses who didn't want to cover her with that much insulin. She knew from experience that if she didn't get that much her sugars would get out of control. Remember, it is better to keep the sugar in an appropriate range than to react to a sugar that is "alarmingly high."

What???It is better to have hyperglycemia than hypoglycemia....

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Specializes in ICU/Critical Care.
What???It is better to have hyperglycemia than hypoglycemia....

No it's not better to have hyperglycemia. There's more risk for infection and less wound healing if blood sugars are not properly controlled. Blood glucose should be maintained within the appropriate limits. It all depends on the patient and their insulin resistance. If you have a problem with giving a patient 100 units of Lantus and 20 units of regular insulin with a meal, by all means call their physcian or endocrinologist to verify the order.

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Specializes in Cardiac Telemetry, ED.
What???It is better to have hyperglycemia than hypoglycemia....

Ever heard of DKA? Ever seen it?

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