Wrong document being scanned in to the wrong chart

[allyyy]

Hi! I just want to post my mistake and see if anyone has advice. I can’t stop thinking about it because I’m afraid of the consequences. So I had a transfer to my floor today, about 2 hours before the end of my shift and I had to put her on a tele monitor, which I did and I hooked her up the nurses station monitor screen. I have no idea how this happened or how it’s even possible but the tele boxes of my new patient and my other patient were switched or something like that. Long story short, I ended up thinking that I was printing the tele strip for my new patient and I was, but it printed out with my other patients name on top of it. I know I should’ve triple checked the name on the tele strip but I set it up so I thought it was perfectly fine. I put it in the scan box to be scanned into the system and it gets scanned in. It goes unnoticed until the end of my shift when the next nurse coming on figures it out. Once she figured it out, I looked into my new patients chart and realized that she didn’t have a tele strip scanned and that her tele strip ended up in the other patients chart with the other patients name on it. I was so upset and embarrassed. I talked to the charge nurse and another nurse and they said that they will have to contact someone to take it out of that patients chart and that I shouldn’t stress over it because they were both NSR and there were no medications given for cardiac (for ex. Someone could’ve been in vtach). The resource nurse told me that she would page the team and let them know and that I could go home because sometimes they take a long time to get back to us if non emergent. I’m going back tomorrow and Im gonna go to that floor and see if anything happened (I’m a float nurse, even worse). Does anyone have any advice? Can I get in serious trouble? I’m just afraid of being fired as a new nurse ??

[Davey Do]

I am by no means a medical nurse, but your situation sounds like merely an error in documentation that is in the process of being rectified, allyyy.

No harm came to the patient(s) and you took action as soon as you realized there was an error.

I had a situation not too long ago where I gave a forced medication to a patient after following the legal process of serving the patient with a Restriction of Rights. When I went to place the Restriction of Rights form in the chart, I could find no doctor's order for a forced medication and had an internal panic episode.

I had gone solely on the report of the previous shift nurse that the patient was on forced meds and that the patient had been receiving forced meds prior to this episode.

After communicating with pharmacy, I found out that the patient did indeed have a doctor's order for a forced med, the actual hard copy order had been misplaced.

Whew!

Even this old dog learned a trick from that one!

Good luck to you, allyyy. I'll be interested in what others have to say.

[TriciaJ, RN]

You go to work tomorrow and ask your charge nurse "Is there any information on how I managed to switch the strips? I thought I was being careful and I've been really disturbed about this." This shows that you take your work seriously, take responsibility and are open to learning.

Then you find out where you went wrong, or if it was a systems error and you're not culpable at all. Thank the Universe that it happened when both patients were NSR. Whatever went wrong can be fixed before there is a more dire outcome.

Take a breath and repeat after me: "I work very hard to be conscientious; I will never be infallible."