Impaired Colleague

[SillyStudent]

I work in a procedural area that administers moderate sedation. One of my coworkers is extremely unhealthy, takes many medications, and falls asleep at work constantly. Like....ALL THE TIME. Like while she is sedating a patient. While she is charting, while she is running our specialized devices.

I had an intervention with her. I told her what she was doing and suggested she see her physician. I tried to express that I cared about her and that I didn't want to see anything bad happen. She cried, promised to get better, got new medications, etc. Did not work.

I finally told my manager about it. Multiple times. In writing. She has avoided dealing with the situation. I can only see two choices and they are both bad:

1. Tell my manager that I refuse to work in the area until she gets another nurse who is not impaired.

2. Go over my manager's head. She is extremely vindictive.

Any suggestions?

[icuRNmaggie, BSN, RN]

An adverse event report will afford coworkers some protection during a DEA investigation of controlled drug diversion.

[calivianya, BSN, RN]

I think the idea of calling a rapid response is awesome. It would bring several new witnesses onto the scene. Maybe your manager can ignore the complaints if it's just you, but if you have a documented rapid response that you file an incident report about, plus everyone on the rapid response team files reports about your sleeping coworker too, your manager isn't going to be able to ignore what's happening and would have to take some action.