Smellnell

Med errors happen all the time. A lot nurses are just too complacent to notice or care. Good on you for caring, but don't beat yourself up.

Lo and behold, who's patient has abnormal results and has been referred to hematology? No thanks needed...but that's mostly because I didn't get any. LOL.

Hi all! I thought I would get a little input from the community because I'm not sure if this doctor has a legitimate complaint about me or if he just can't take criticism. I work in outpatient OBGYN. I generally work under one physician but will help out with triage calls for other nurses when time allows. I took the call of a patient's husband for whom we had done some genetic screening on. Turns out his pregnant wife is a carrier for alpha thal and her physician had offered to test her husband. Her husband called for the results and I happened to notice that the hemoglobin electrophoresis wasn't complete and was missing some elements (it was sent to a lab that we don't normally use). When I brought it to the attention of the physician, he responded that he had "reviewed the result of his hemoglobin electrophoresis. Test results are normal.". I spoke to him later in the day and explained why I didn't think his testing was complete. He again said that everything looked normal to him but that he would look into it. An entire day had passed and I still had this patient's call up on my desktop. I asked his nurse if they had discussed it and she said "no". I wanted to leave for the day but also wanted to make sure that the gentleman received a call so I emailed the physician and his nurse apologizing for giving the call back to them but noted that I didn't feel comfortable telling the gentleman that his results were normal because his results didn't reflect the testing I had been taught was needed. Later that night he wrote a scathing email to both me and my manager calling me "totally unprofessional" and saying that if I ever needed clarification on something I needed to come to him. I guess he was upset that he told me that he would "look into it" and I dismissed that when I tossed the call back to the team and said I didn't want to call the patient. My feeling is that it's not my job to stroke his ego. I know the testing was wrong. If he and his nurse want to figure it out and he wants to take the time to look things up in an untimely manner before calling the patient, then the problem needs to be theirs. I didn't want it on my plate anymore. Perhaps I could have been more diplomatic? He ended up ordering the test I had suggested, by the way.