Looking for some help with my state survey POC. We got only 1 nursing tag (yea us) and of course I'm rolling up my sleeves and planning to IDR this and I believe I have a reasonable chance. We're a small facility and had 2 med pass errors which put us just over the threshold for greater than 5% med error rate (F759). One of these "errors" was not taking a pulse prior to giving Digoxin. There was no physician order to monitor pulse, we take pulse weekly with other vitals and pulse always stable, our policy said "take vitals as necessary....". The surveyor cited based on Nursing 2013 drug handbook that indicated administration includes taking a pulse prior.
In long term care, this is outdated practice from everything I've heard & most facilities I've been a part of has gone away from all this over monitoring years ago to reduce nursing time during medication pass. We all know patients in their own homes do not take daily pulse with digoxin, blood pressures prior to HTN meds, etc. Problem is - I'm having a lot of difficulty finding credible resources to support my IDR efforts. Anyone with a good resource to support this practice?
.gif.57a6efa3f35e13982d1afb52399520d0.gif){kind=avatar}
.thumb.gif.a0171653eaae518ecf728198d692fc48.gif){kind=avatar}