What's your most creative solution to a problem at work, clinical and otherwise?

[Popwhizbangz, LPN]

Hi fellow Nurses - I love stories, especially stories about heroes overcoming obstacles by their wits and their will.

Therefore, of course, I love Nurse's stories -

These heroes, foot soldiers in the trenches, so to speak, who somehow against all obstacles make a bewilderingly complicated, chaotic and dysfunctional health care system work for people every day. Saving lives, and easing pain.

Heroes who do it so well that much of the time, their patients don't even begin to realize just how challenging it was.

Please, tell us your stories......

[LegzRN]

Once, in the ED, a pt lost control of their vehicle and ended up smashing their driver side window out and sustaining facial lacs. She was cleaned, sutured, and ready to go when she realized it was raining and pretty chilly outside. When I was going over her discharge instructions with her she told me about the broken window so I went outside with a couple rolls of surgical tape and four patient belongings bags and taped that sucker shut. Not really clinical, but it did solve a problem.

[General E. Speaking, RN, RN]

We had a patient that had surgery resulting in a urostomy. Not a surgery we do frequently. We had no urostomy bags in house. It was after hours when the patient returned from surgery. We (the nurses) ended up using a colostomy bag and with trial and error managed to get the colostomy bag taped (without leaks) to a foley drainage bag.

Once we had a very confused restless patient that kept crawling out of bed. We did not have the staff at the hospital to pull a tech to sit privately with her. Eventually, we brought her to the nurses station and placed a pile of washcloths in front of her and asked her to "help" us with the laundry. She folded for a while and then became exasperated with the workload (we kept secretly unfolding and replacing) and told us that we were too messy and we needed to learn do our own laundry! She took a nice nap after her hard day's work.

Not rocket science..but just a few things that came to mind.