Suction trouble

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Specializes in Critical Care.

A situation came up today at work leaving the whole nursing staff feeling like crap and shaking our heads on how we plus the surgeon missed this.

We have a patient who has been in the ICU since July 31. He has a HUGE open abdominal would from surgery. At one point he was improving, but now is on the vent. I think almost all our nurses have either taken care of him, or helped taken care of him. He has been on the vent for weeks with an NG to LIS.

The surgeon he has tends to blame nurses when his patients aren't getting better but worse. (I think t his may be happening now)

Any how today, after many days of seeing this patient, comes out of his room irate because the paitients suction is not on LIS but Continious suction, and now may have a small bleed from it. He wasn't my patient today, but he has been, and I had to go see for myself. Low and behold there were three suction setups, and they were all continious. How in the hell did we all miss that? Plus, why didn't the surgeon notice days earlier?

He wanted a new NG tube placed, and the nurse ask him if he was going to place it. He states, "you do it, I did it when I was an orderly!"

Now, this paitent has not been in good shape for a while, but we are all feeling not so good on this one. Another new lesson learned, check the suction!

Doris

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Specializes in Critical Care.

Update on this situation. The reason this intermittent suction was missed was because THE DOCTOR NEVER WROTE THE ORDER FOR INTERMITTENT!

Our unit secretary was miffed the doctor acted like he did, and investigated this pt's orders from weeks ago and found that the doctor only ordered ng to suction. He did not order intermititent until he saw blood in the NG.

We feel better about ourselves now.:yeah:

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