nursesbca

I posting to give all those who responded an update on the situation described above. The situation has become more heated as the days go on. The gentleman that died that day was the father in law of one of a nurse in the hospital. She asked the nurse that I worked with that day about what happened and she proceeded to tell her about the vitals not being completed the night before and our hesitance in doing his BP first thing on our shift. She was upset understandably and our nurse manager was involved the first day it happened. That nurse then proceeded to ask our manager about what happened and what would be done about the situation regarding her father in law and our nurse manager told her that all of his vitals were done and charted (which was an outright lie!). I looked at that charting a lot that day, there were no vitals charted since 1800hrs the evening before and I also wrote that in my nurse's notes. Needless to say there is a lot of tension between the night and day nurses during this shift, a lot of conflicting stories about the care that was done on nights. The nurse that worked with me is upset about the care that was not provided that night and the night nurses are accusing the day nurse of a breach of confidentiality in telling the nurse who works in the hospital about what happened with her father in law. :stone

Just wondering if anyone else has the same problem as we do in our ICU. I worked there today and the doctor didn't show up to see his patient till 7:30pm in the evening. I waited all morning so finally I called to give a verbal update over the phone in the early afternoon. Anyone else experience this?? Makes me so frustrated at times!

Today had to be one of the most stressful situations that I have had to deal with lately. I worked a shift in ICU (small 3 bed ICU) and myself and another nurse were taking care of 3 patients. 2 of these patients were fresh MI's and the other was pneumonia, sinus tachycardia and septicemia (really sick). So we sit down and get our report at 730am and the 3rd patient described above had had a horrible day yesterday (very restless, aggressive. etc) and overnight had received 2 doses of IM Haldol. In report the nurse working nights had said that she let the man rest the entire night as he had been through so much the day before and was fine this morning. So the other nurse and myself decided between us that we would take care of the other 2 patients (do assessment, vitals, etc.) and attend to out 3rd patient last (we figured we would let him get a little more rest. Upon entering the room the patient looked a mess, bedclothes messed up, looked like he hadn't been touched all night. In checking his vital signs he had a temp of 33.4 and BP of 66/33, no urinary output since 6am. We immediately checked his chart from last night and not a single BP charted, not a single temp charted. In reading the night nurses notes, the patient's spO2 had dropped to 70% on 5 L of O2 and the doctor was not even called. I called the doctor to inform him of the patients condition which was poor, low BP, no urinary output, unresponsive, etc. The orders given to me was to D/C the Haldol and give a 250cc bolus of NS over 1 hour. About 10 minutes later the doc calls back again and tells us to hold all of his po meds (the patient was not alert enough to swallow them anyway). By this time our gentleman in Room 3 developed chest pain and we were in the middle of doing EKG's, giving NitroSpray, taking BP's, etc. The doc calls back once again and asks to start our sick man on a dopamine gtt and to give some more boluses. By this time the man is having 5-10 second periods of apnea, becoming bradycardic and eventually having periods of asystole and expires on us while we are right there in the room (he was a no code thank goodness). Finally about 10 mins after the man passes, the doc comes in and gets all upset saying that we were too late in calling him with the low BP, more or less implying that he died because of our negligence to call him earlier. This situation upset me for 2 reasons, in that the night nurse gave us a false impression of the patient status (how could she know his BP was in his boots if she didn't even bother to do one!) and the doc not giving proper orders the first time that he was called regarding the patients status and having the nerve to say that we were not doing our jobs. Our nurse manager was informed of the situation and we were told that we followed the correct steps, apparently this doc gets upset when he loses patients and tries to blame everyone else. He should have come in to assess the patient after the first phone call! Sorry this post is so long but I need to vent!!! I'm probably going to be working ICU again tomorrow. :uhoh21:

Hi :) I've been a nurse for 2 years. My current position is in the replacement pool and I work Medicine, Surgery and ICU (for the past year). I recently got a letter saying that I would be orientating to ER. I feel that I just do not have the experience to work in ER yet. I do not have ACLS or TNCC and I expressed my concerns in writing to my nursing supervisor and the response I got was that I had no choice, I had to orientate. I have since contacted my union and will be writing another letter to my supervisor and director of nursing. Any input would be greatly appreciated :) Thanks a Bunch!!