Inaccurate story on CNN?

[amyphee]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/05/florida.teen.burned.apology/

Did anyone else see this article on CNN.com? Very sad. Of course, as a former burn nurse, I was a bit irritated when they wrote that teams of doctors do the 4-hour dressing changes on this patient. No matter how severe the burn was, unless it was in the OR, nurses did the dressing changes. Now, I could be wrong, considering I only put in 1 year on a burn unit before leaving for psych nursing, but I thought nurses or wound care specialists did the dressing changes.

[GreyGull]

It is true that Jackson Memorial is a teaching hospital but so is the hospital that I work at, in the Regional Burn Unit, and I don't care if it is a 75 percenter.... NURSES do the wound care. I highly doubt that there is one doctor let alone a "team" of doctors doing his wound care. I pray for this boy and his family. The one thing he has going for him is that he is yound and without preexisting conditions.

You can not judge every hospital by your one experience nor can you judge all doctors by a few bad ones. New physicians will sometimes strive to get into certain residencies programs for the overall experience and those who go on to be attendings are noticed by their bedside participation. I have found this to be very true in peds and neonates. For some their overall attitude towards nurses and the patient are very different if they come from certain teaching hospitals. Too bad your experiences with physicians have not been pleasant.

Even without the residents, the "team" of attendings may include the Intensivist and/or a Pulmonologist, ID for major infections, and Plastics (surgeons). Rarely does a complex burn patient only have one physician on his case.

[GreyGull]

Oh and I forgot.. it is the NURSES who do the debridements as well. The docs go look at them in ER, write debridement orders and floor or ICU order and don't even come to see them after the debridement, just the enxt day.

For serious burns, especially for peds, it has been my experience that the burn team will take the patient back to their unit as quickly as possible. The team, including the doctor(s), would not just walk away from a child with 65% burns especially with airway issues.

[hiddencatRN, BSN, RN]

During clinical rotation for my peds class, I shadowed in a Burn Unit, and the doctors (residents, plastics, and the attending) were all present and active in the wound care that I saw (dressing change on an older burn and debridement of a new burn). The debridement involved conscious sedation for the patient but the dressing change didn't. So it doesn't seem impossible that doctors sometimes do burn care.