this week was my first official med pass as a nursing student! my question regards one of my patients with a feeding tube. first, let me explain to you what happened. in lab we were taught if the patient is on several medications, you need to crush each one separately, put them in individual medicine cups and mix with 15 ml of warm water to let them dissolve. next you need to first flush with 30 ml of water to clear the tube and administer each medication separately, flushing with 15-30 ml of water in between each medication. well, on the first day, i had prepared all of my medications in their individual cups and turned to my instructor and asked her if she was ready to go into the patients room with me to administer the medications (it was my first time and assumed she was going to come with me). she replied "no". fine. i then said ok and explained to her that i have all the medications crushed, in separate cups and that i would administer each one separately with the 15-30 ml of water flush in between. she cut me off and told me not to administer them separately, just mix them all together and administer them all together at once. i was kind of surprised because of all the things we were taught about what could happen if you did not administer each medication separately (clogging the tube, adverse effects from mixing the medications together, etc.) well i did what she told me and put all the crushed medications into one cup and administered them. well yesterday after i finished my pharmacology final, my professor told me she needed to speak to me. apparently, one of my fellow clinical students had told the teacher that i was administering the medications incorrectly and that our clinical instructor was telling me to do so. i had to explain to her the whole situation and tell her other things that the instructor was telling us to do differently (like signing the mar before we give the medications and borrowing medications from other patients) my instructor told me that she was going to have to report this to the program manager and that she will have to make a decision on what happens next. i do not know what is going to happen next and i am horrified that i am going to get kicked out of my program. i feel extremely guilty for not administering the medications in a way that we were taught, but my instructor told me to.
my question to all of you is this: what would you have done? did i do the wrong thing? should i have ignored what my clinical instructor told me to do and administer them separatly like i was taught? how do you administer your medications through a feeding tube? do you administer them all separately? we always hear that what you learn in school will not always apply to the "real world".
thank you all so much for reading this long post and i'm looking forward to hearing your comments, replies and criticisms.
