Mistakes in practice

O sweetheart you shouldn't of been put in that situation. You made an error by being put into a dangerous situation, I have been there myself as a final year. I am guessing by your terminology you are either in the UK, Ireland, NZ or Australia.

You were put in a situation where the nurse manager should of stepped in, either taking a load, calling in a regular staff member or offering someone overtime. As a student you were trying to do your best for your ward and your patients, the bank nurse was also in a dangerous situation who should of advocated for herself and her registration.

I was caught in a situation of being a 4th year student on nights, economy in the tank in Ireland, I was covering a RN on sick leave, the other RN was newly qualified and next to usless. I ended up running the respiratory care unit with 3 on bipap as well as assisting with 12 other pts. We had a code blue that night. The nurse went to pieces and I ended up running the code till the twam appeared. Pt didn't make it but had massive medical history.

Anyway, talk to your placement coordinator or whoever is your link tutor, ask them to support you in a conversation with the ward manager, you need to do this. Have a chat to your union as they can assit you with how to stand up to these situations when they happen again.

Use this situation, not mentioning the ward of course when you are doing your interviews. I am here if you need to talk.

I am surprised you were put in a situation like that. I'm assuming you are not from the US but here, we cannot do anything like admissions and stuff. We really can't do anything without an instructor present. We have to show we are competent in an area before we can do it. Also, if the patient himself told you no allergies, then I wouldn't worry about it too much. Especially if you had no accompanying paperwork at the time. Where was your clinical instructor? Like I said, I'm pretty sure you aren't from the US so I have no idea if things are different where you are, but I would think you would have had an instructor somewhere.

Thanks for the comments, it's made me feel a lot better! I'm from the UK and once we have been seen to be competent at something we can do it without someone watching directly although our work should always be checked. I've done tons of admissions before and never missed anything so this shook me up a bit. I am definitely going to speak to the manager about it as we've been short staffed a lot lately. Admissions take a long time on this ward as there is much to fill in but then there are other things going on too so it's hard to get it all done at once. We have mentors rather than clinical instructors over here in the UK but don't always work with them. It's amazing how many patients don't know they have allergies, on another placement I had a patient who said she wasn't allergic to anything but when I looked in her past history she'd had quite a severe reaction to morphine. I'm now going to be even more careful when checking for allergies!

You sound like a wonderful, very conscientious student who will be an excellent nurse. Don't be so hard on yourself. It sounds like you did everything in your power to gather an accurate health history on this patient. He told you he had no allergies and you had no documentation available to tell you otherwise so documenting that he was allergy free was appropriate at that time. In the future, if you doubt the veracity of the information being given to you by a patient, you could document that and report off to the next shift that records need to be obtained in order to verify the information given by the patient. Good luck to you and keep up the good work :-)

Competence and expert are not the same. A competent nurse should not have been in a situation that demanded more expertise. However, I think you did well under the circumstances. We all make mistakes. Do not beat yourself up over it. No one was hurt and you learned from it. That is enough.