blondy2061h MSN, RN

How long is it reasonable to leave someone NPO with IV fluids, no TPN, or enteral feeds? I've been searching and have difficulty finding evidence to answer this question.

It's a good point. A nurse I work with made an extremely similar error, but the med they gave instead of the ordered med was not one with life threatening side effects so no viral news story there.

They don't know how much was given. The CMS report makes that very clear. There were two syringes with different amounts of liquid. They weren't able to determine what was in each one. The nurse was very non-committal to what dose she gave. To me th...

I was initially confused at how an ICU patient ended up off the unit without an ICU nurse or monitor, but it seems the patient was awaiting a floor bed. That then makes me confused why they jumped to IV versed for a PET scan. Seems like PO Xanax wou...

Oh I do suspect she'll never be a nurse again

But if the option is a nurse with no ER experience or no extra nurse at all, I'll take the one with no ER experience. I won't expect them to function independently, but they can be delegated to by other nurses. Hopefully there are some tasks they kno...

When you have such a big institution you're going to have more events than the average place even if your percentage is much better than average.

I just got done reading the 56 page CMS report and I have a lot more questions than when I started. The nurse got the vecoronium out of the neuro ICU pyxis, where the patient was an inpatient. That explains how she had access to it. The bin was l...

They clearly didn't know enough about vec of versed to know if it made sense

The RN may be the last line of defense, but by overriding the med she went ahead and bypassed ever other line of defense and made herself the only live off defense.

I don't understand that either. If she was sick enough to require an ICU or a SDU clearly she wasn't appropriate to have an outpatient test. Sometimes a PET scan is required to guide treatment plans. Working in oncology I have seen many an inpatient ...

This is what I don't understand about the timeline. 30 minutes since she got the vec when the code was called and they got her back with 2 rounds of acls? But she was so hypoxic she was declared brain dead within 24 hours? As far as job descriptions...

I feel like "opiod epidemic" had just become such a trendy catch phrase with half the people using it having no idea what they're talking about our why they're using it in the context of patients who really are looking for pain relief. We used to ta...

That's punishment. A mask isn't. A mask is PPE.

I have idiopathic intracranial hypertension also and an NSAID allergy, so yeah, that's my life.

Sounds like you probably had a lot of patients with very poorly managed pain. Yikes.

Nurses won't be waking them up to flush their lines

Thank you so much for sharing this and taking steps to prevent it from happening again!

It's good for a student to get good habits, too, I guess. Then become more efficient later.

That checklist for the student nurses is almost hilarious when you think that it's not uncommon in my area for some nurses to have 16 patients on night shift and not unheard of for patients to have meds due every 2 hours. That just isn't happening. S...

Sorry! It really is just nuts.

I struggle with this too. I tell people to do the same we do in every AMA situation- establish competence, educate and document. More so than the fall risk patients, I struggle with patients I suspect are doing drugs or self harming in the bathroom.

It started on YouTube. There's a prominent cystic fibrous vlogger who vlogs daily- Mary Frey. She's quite popular among the "Spoonie" community. Then came Chronically Jaquie. She started the daily vlogging thing too and seemed to copy Mary routinely....

That is a good point. If these are patients and family members calling in maybe something like "Have a peaceful day" would be better.

That sounds perfect to me