OK, I'm calm now after a few days of venting of management and coworkers. But I'm still upset.
It's a very confusing story and for confidentiality's sake I'll be vague.
We were taking care of a gyn patient with an infection. We have gyn residents and they were her primary. She spiked a fever, they ordered a chest xray as part of her work up. It showed pneumonia. They say call her medical doc witht he cxr results.
They also order an ABG. Here's where nursing and RT mess up. Through a series of mishaps the ABG takes 3 hours to do.
Shift changes, on comes myself. I get the ABG results on my time and they don't look good. Not "we need to vent the patient" but the was hypoxic. I immediately call the medical doc, we get a pulmonary and infectious disease consult. The ladies temp is now 104 and she's breathing 44. But she is complaining of now SOB, I'm in the room with the patient and here comes the gyn residents. They know I've called ina pulmonologist because they arrive while I'm on the phone with him. They see the patient and all they order is a continuous pulse ox.
The pulmonologist comes in and says her Xray is worse than just pneumonia and we transfer the patient to critical care for further monitoring.
The pulmonologist later complains to the gyn residents how they are mismanaging the infection, that they need to I&D her immediately, that she is septic and they are throwing her into ARDS.....too much info I know.
I'm now out of the picuture. The supervisor shows me a blistering report from the Gyn residents, how we had a critical patient, how were ignoriing her, how were weren't promptly reporting her condition, how we were falsifying records and saying she was breathing 18 (her day shift respirations) and completely made us look dangerous and imcompetent.
I was livid to say the least. Particularly since they were in the room, and if she was so critical why didn't they order an ICU bed at that time????
I feel completely confident in how I handled the situation once I had the blood gases. Yes, we're going to have to eat the fact we delayed treatment because of the blood gas incident. But as soon as I had the gases I responded with the appropriate docs: medical and pulmonary.
I'm getting mad all over again. I of course wrote my version of the story, correcting their several "misconceptions" which to me were borderline lies. They obviously were upset that a pulmonolgist said they were killing their patient and had to blame nursing.....grrr.
I know I've lost most of you by now, thanks so much for listening.
Yes, our documentation is immaculate and we will prevail in the end.
