cloverfield

I can't think of anything that caused this incident. It's not like we were busy, I only had that one patient to deal with. I simply was not concentrating. A registrar is a senior doctor in the UK. I told him about it, but I did not tell the nursing managers as I should have done as the registrar told me that absolutely nothing would happen to the patient and there's no point causing myself grief and problems when they're not necessary. My managers are well known for tearing people to shreds after a minor incident - let alone a major one.

Hi everyone. I've been an A&E nurse for 5 years without any serious incident - even managed to avoid the plethora of complaints haha! However recently I made a serious drug error and my confidence to practice has completely been destroyed. In a nutshell, I gave a patient with anaphylaxis a second dose of adrenaline 1:1000(!) as a fast bolus IV injection instead of IM. His ecg was, let's say 'unnerving' for about 5 minutes but then settled back to NSR. I am very well aware that it should only be given IM (I gave the first dose IM) and if given IV you should give 1:10,000 at 1ml/min but I just wasn't concentrating. The registrar was made aware of the incident directly after I realised I'd done it. In the past few days, I've realised that doing this has absolutely shattered my confidence and I'm at the stage now where I'm almost terrified to go back and practice. I know that the half life of adrenaline is 2 minutes so any effects were long gone after 10 minutes and there will be no lasting effects. However this isn't the point. What bothers me so much is the fact of what COULD have happened. It could easily have put him into arrest and that's what has left me feeling so bad and so guilty. Has anyone else experienced what I'm going through? If so, please give me some pointers on how I can get over it because I feel so bad about it and my once exuberant confidence lies in ruins whilst I'm now a bag of nerves even dispensing 2 paracetamol!