The Art of the Brain Sheet

[Davey Do]

I learned the term "Brain Sheet" from this website and I believe it's a piece of paper where we keep important quick reference patient information. At Wrongway Regional Medical Center, we use something we merely call a "Patient List". On this sheet, is basic patient identifying information- age, diagnosis, attending, and precipitating reason for admission- and it's where we take notes at shift report. We also give report from the Patient list.

Friday night, I was pulled to the adult male psych unit, which is a high acuity, high admission unit. It was a busy night and I took report on, finished, or completely did a total of 12 admissions. I also dealt with, besides routine duties, a psychotic behavior and two relatively acute, concerning medical conditions.

Now, to say that I did all this would be would be a statement of fiction. I had a great house administrator and several coworkers that went above and beyond to assist me in my endeavors.

This is a representational copy of one of the three pages, with identifying information obscured for obvious reasons.

Ain't it purty?!

[Davey Do]

The next shift, Saturday night, I was back on my home unit of geriatric psych. I had one admission waiting for me and took report on two more.

After completing the admission interview and obtaining orders for the first admission, I was getting the charts together for the other admissions when I knocked over my partial can of water.

I didn't notice that it had spilled until I went searching for my notes, when I found them lying in a small puddle. Initially, I hung the papers over the back of a chair to dry, but decided to just make a copy for immediate use.

Once again, all true identifying information has been changed, but other than that, this is what the top half of the first page looked like:

I think I'll call it "Brain Sheet in the Rain".

[Davey Do]

I was sitting back, looking at my Brain Sheet in the Rain and thought, "You know- it looks something like the image on the Shroud of Turin":

I did quite a bit of reading on The Shroud when I was young, and even though scientific studies say the shroud is probably a fake, I like to think it is what it is believed to be.

[Daisy4RN]

On 5/7/2019 at 6:36 AM, Davey Do said:

Ain't it purty?! 

Yes it is purity!!

I remember when I first started nursing. I used a plain piece of paper folded into quarters and used one quarter per person. No formalized "brain sheet", just a blank piece of paper with pertinent pt info written on the paper in a way that made sense to me. If working 3 days I would save it and just update the next day. By the time I left bedside nursing (20+ yrs later) I had 1 sheet per pt (formal page) that looked just like yours, sometimes so much on there I couldn't even read my own writing anymore. Last place I worked they wanted everyone to use the same exact "tool". Nope, I was used to mine and it worked for me, not changing and not sorry (ie rebel with a cause).