pinta

I am absolutely mortified. I have been a nurse for 9 months. I work on a skilled nursing unit and tonight I gave a patient 1MG Risperdal instead of coumadin. I've had to take the coumadin out of our back-up supply for the last three nights. Our back up meds are a stack of trays with different compartments for all of the meds. Well, I had gotten complacent. I grabbed the wrong tray and took four pills out of the compartment I thought contained coumadin. Similar size, shape, color. While I was giving them to the patient I thought, "wow, I didn't even check the label on these this time" so I stopped and looked in the trash and saw "risperidone" on the back of the bubble pack. I felt like I was going to faint! I automatically told my supervisor, called the patient's wife, and called the on-call physician who (rightfully!) gave me an earful. I am horrified at myself. What a stupid thing to do! What kills me is that there is absolutely no excuse.. the entire blame is on my laziness and complacency. The tiny silver lining is that I will NEVER EVER give a drug without reading the label again, even if I have given it 5, 10, 100 times and the med looks correct. I wish that my supervisor had yelled at me, I feel like I need to get flogged I feel so bad for the pt. (No ill effects thank goodness, but it doesn't even matter.) I don't want a pity party, I just had to get this off my chest. I am not a stupid person, and that was a stupid thing to do. I have to really examine myself and think about why I did it.

Hi all, I have been an LPN working in long term care for around 6 months and I really like it. I would like to get my RN for a multitude of reasons: To eventually get management positions, to work in an acute care hospital. My "eventual" goal right now is to get my NP and be a primary care provider for seniors. That may change, but I would like to work towards getting my NP at some point in my career. My question is, do I get my ADN-RN or BSN-RN right now? I will eventually need a BSN to get into NP programs (right?) but I'm not sure if it makes sense to get it all out of the way now, or get my RN and then get my BSN through another program. One more thing: I already have a Bachelor's degree in Human Development. Does this change anything? Thanks!