Frequency of observations

the trusts are so scared of getting sued, death of injury due to medical/nursing care and protocols called into question.

i can say as a 1st student on a ENT ward i was taking obs and in a sense i had to learn how to intreput, by frequently checking with RN, they are just numbers and not a way of assesing conditions. if hca or st/n are taking the obs the figures are only as good as the ability to asses and that is why EWS i think has come in. EWS has helped me in A&E a raised EWS score made me alert medical staff to check him after i asked my mentor. however recently i was doing progess and evalution on a pt that a 1st year st/n had taken the obs, pt had raised resp low bp all charted, scoring ews=3(medics to be informed) but no action taken and the 1st year didn't know these were things you act on. pt got volume expanders and follow up fluid was on iv abx.

i know you are not talking about st/n

I know what you're saying but causing nurses to effectively spend even less time truly assessing their patients is actually going to cause more problems in the long run. I'm not talking about no obs though, just sensible amounts.

For your interest I have had cause to send a patient who "only had a gastroscopy" to the Coronary Care Unit because she developed chest pain & it turned out she'd was having an MI!

I want to add that patient was in recovery at the time, they had supposedly been doing obs but were in a hurry to get her back to the ward. they tried to persuade me her chest pain was related to gas used in the procedure - well I know that they don't do that in gastroscopies only colonoscopies! Her obs were all charted as stable but when I insisted on them putting her back on the monitor (which they are supposed to be on in recovery) her heart rate was over 200 & she was throwing off ectopics!! Where all the multitude of charted stable obs came from I don't know!!

That's why I think that a more sensible regime that allows time to properly assess the actual state of the patient is better than hundreds of obs where no-one's actually looking!

I was concerned the minute I walked into recovery, just looking at the patient. The recovery nurses were looking at their machines & writing down whatever without thinking. They were taking obs every 5 mins but failed to spot the start of an MI!! Maybe if they were only taking them every 15 mins they'd have had a chance to actually look properly at their patient instead??

We do vitals every 15 mins for one hour, 1/2hourly for 1 hour and then hourly for one hour. Depends on the condition of patient of course.

We do the exact same thing too!!!