wanderingRound

Loved it, can totally relate!

Sorry you've been going through a rough time at work lately. It seems where I work (a busy surgical unit) we go through phases of having absolutely crazy patients/families like you described above, and then we go through stretches of having great patients. A few weeks ago I could totally relate to what you have been going through. Things will get better once you discharge some of your crazy ones! That is as long as you don't work in a LTC facility. What type of facility do you work in?

They were checking sputum because they were trying to figure out why his WBC count was in the 20's, not trying to rule out MRSA.

What happens all the time... getting sued for something like that, or taking care of patients and later finding out they had something nasty?

No, but I'm one of the nurses who took care of him and could have overlooked the microbiology results which resulted in an extra day(s) he could have been in isolation.

They had some sort of disease/illness you could have transmitted from them but nobody realized they had the condition until later on? I had a patient from prison this last week and I took care of him for a total of 6 nights (12 hour shifts) to find out on my last night that the day nurse looked at the results of his sputum culture and saw he has respiratory MRSA. He had really been coughing pretty badly for the past few nights which makes me paranoid about the whole situation. Myself and the CNAs who had been caring for him are frustrated about it and wish we would have known sooner, especially since many of us have small children at home. The sputum culture was taken from the day of 5/17 and no one realized he had respiratory MRSA until the morning of 5/20 and at that point he was placed in airborne isolation. I know it can take a couple days for cultures to come back, but I'm guessing the results were back for atleast a day without anyone checking the microbiology report to see what type of culture was growing. Could this place the nurses that were caring for him who should have checked the report (and subsequently initiated isolation precautions) under any liability if someone were to be infected with respiratory MRSA and push the case?