Your funniest "are you serious?!?!" MIDAS report

[DesiDani]

Recently our manager told us to stop putting in frivolous Midas reports and that it goes into corporate.

[Serhilda, ADN, RN]

On 9/23/2016 at 10:52 AM, HouTx said:

This is probably going to be a really unpopular opinion

It is important to report 'near misses' as well as actual adverse incidents.... because THAT is where the real improvements come from. Serious events always get a lot of attention, especially "never events" and sentinel events. But those are usually about finding about what happened and taking corrective actions after the fact.

The 'near miss' information provides information about bad processes or systems... things like nurses skipping steps in order to cope with higher workloads; or inaccurate sponge counts because there aren't enough veteran OR nurses left to hold the line against impatient surgeons. Maybe nothing bad has happened yet, but it's probably only a matter of time until it does.

So, yeah, I would definitely take appropriate action if I saw someone doing an sterile procedure without gloves or other adequate safeguards. I hope you would too.

Except we all know reporting "near misses" caused by higher workloads won't do a single thing to address the root of the problem. Instead, the nurse in question is called in and scorned with the blame falling squarely on her shoulders, initially of course. Let's not encourage the cannibalization of nurses.

Not wearing gloves in a situation like that won't be improved whatsoever by an incident report, honestly. The same people filing incident reports as if they have some quota to meet seem to be the same ones forgetting direct communication is an option. Educating or reminding the nurse would be sufficient, hence why filing incident reports nonchalantly is viewed as petty tattling.