Sucky Nurse

[BunnyJas]

SO is in the hospital for a boost on his medications. He receives a couple of intravenous meds three times a day. Well, today the nurse came in as usual and started his first IV med for the day and left. A bit later SO happened to look at the IV bag and realized that she had given him the wrong med! He rang for her and when she came in he told her that she had given him the wrong med. At first she denied it since the med looked like the right one and it had his name on it. He told her to look closer at the label and sure enough it was in fact the wrong med. She unhooked the IV from him and went to get the doctor.

The doctor came in and told SO that the med was actually an antibiotic for fungus (i.e. thrush). In other words, thankfully the wrong med would most likely not do any damage to him. The doctor then went on to tell SO that the nurse told him that SHE had noticed it was the wrong med and had caught it BEFORE giving it to SO! SO angrily told the doctor that the nurse's heroic story was not true and that she HAD given it to him and HE had noticed it was wrong and rang for her.

Thankfully, SO will be okay. I'm angry that he was given the wrong med (the bag had passed THREE hands before coming to him!), but I'm even more angry at this so-called nurse. She freakin' LIED to protect herself! What if the doctor hadn't known this med was already given to him and it was harmful?! Oh well, the stupid beeoch just dug herself a deeper grave and I hope she gets fired or suspended. It's one thing to admit you made a mistake but quite another when you lie about it, especially about something this serious. As a healthcare worker myself this kind of incompetance always makes me mad, but when you add dishonesty to the mix I really get pissed. On the bright side, SO is coming home tomorrow and we won't have to worry about this crap anymore. Thanks for letting me vent.

[Broomjockey]

I hope she gets fired.

It's one thing to make a mistake. It's something else to lie about who noticed it. It's an entirely new level of hell to not mention that a patient was receiving incorrect IV meds. That nurse is lucky it wasn't a med that could do damage, or the doc probably would have gotten her turfed immediately.

I'm glad your SO's okay.

[Der Cute]

Report this incident IMMEDIATELY to the Head Nurse on shift, and DOCUMENT THIS for the hospital.

Hospitals try to avoid errors, (we all do), but in Health Care, its a very tender issue.

DO NOT LET THIS DROP.

It may only be an iv drip med, for thrush..but there are ways to identify the underlying problem, and fix it.

Is the color of the IV bag same as your real needed med?
Is the name of the IV bag same as your real needed med?
Are they stored in same areas?

See where i'm going? It may be a human mistake, but there are organization rules and tactics to avoid this.

This mistake is small. Agreed. But hospitals try to avoid this, and are always working on ways to not have mistakes like this happen.

REPORT THIS TO THE HEAD NURSE. AND THE HEAD OF THE WARD.
Follow up with another letter to Risk Management at the hospital: a good hospital will work on fixing this, and try to get JAHCO credentialing. (something about being a good, org hospital)

I know you're in there working on a sick person, and that person is very important to you. Please, after he's home, start this ball rolling.

Cutenoob
(i worked in a hosp recently. )

[BunnyJas]

Thanks for your suggestions, but I think that all that has been taken care of. According to my SO (he told me about this incident over the phone), an incident report was made to doctors/nurses on duty and as far as we know the people directly involved are going to at least be written up. SO assured me that he had made the complaints to the right people and that heads will be rolling. The reason the mix-up happened is that the wrong med looked very much like the cypro he was supposed to be taking, but the initial person didn't look at the label and just slapped his name on it. Unfortunately no one noticed until it got to him.

[AFpheonix]

Good lord, she LIED about him recieving the wrong thing? What if what she'd gven him reacted to what he was really supposed to get? If she'd mistakenly given him an anticoagulant and then proceeded to put him on, say, a sulfa med, he'd have been in a world of hurt!

The reality is that anytime you have humans doing something, there's a margin for error. Yes, we can do everything we can to reduce that error, but there will still be some things that get through. But the response to that error is the most important thing.
I'm sure her ass is grass, since she totally put the hospital in danger of a malpractice suit.

[Sunsetsky]

There are some jobs where errors are not acceptable. Nursing is one of them. She's lucky that the medicine that was mistakenly given to him didn't harm him at all. Their excuse isn't a good excuse at all. I took a zookeeping veterinary class (while it involved animals instead of people, the concept is the same) and I was taught that you ALWAYS read the label (should be common sense). There are lots of medications that look alike.

[Tria]

to get? If she'd mistakenly given him an anticoagulant and then proceeded to put him on, say, a sulfa med, he'd have been in a world of hurt!

Okay, what would the sulfa med have done?

[AFpheonix]

Sulfa meds increase the concentration of anticoagulants like warfarin in the body, creating a very real risk of hemorrage. Bad juju.

We actually had an old lady in the other night who's doctor had called in bactrim (sulfameth/trimethoprim) for a bladder infection. The lady was on warfarin and also on some other heart meds. She showed up to get her stuff right after we'd taken it off of voicemail and called the doctor, but hadn't given the doctor enoug time to call us back.
The patient wanted us to dispense anyways! We didn't, we waited until we got ahold of the doctor, who didn't consider that interaction.
She didn't have many choices anyways, because she was allergic to penicillin, and cipro would have interacted with her heart meds. We tried to get her to go for macrobid, but the doctor "didn't like that one"
So keflex it was, even though it's not as good for that sort of infection.

[Boulder_Bear]

I'm allergic to both pennicilin and sulfa meds. Pennicilin makes my organs shut down, and the last time I took a sulfa med I was throwing up for about 8 hours straight(it started coming out very very black after a couple hours). While I'm on the topic of complaining about nurses. When my wife had our baby, the baby had some complications and had to stay an extra day in the NICU. We were told that because my wife was no longer interned that the nurses would be changing and feeding the baby(my baby couldn't breast feed, that was one of the problems). We actually rented a room in the hospital so that we could stay close with the baby. We go and hand the baby off to the nurses and my wife and I go to sleep in our room. About half an hour later this stupid nurse comes in our room without knocking wakes us up and announces, "your baby is hungry and she needs her diaper changed." and then she just walked out. Don't get me wrong I love my daughter and am very willing to do these things for her, but when I'm paying $2000 a day for NICU service I would really like to get what I am paying for. It was just something that really bugged me that she was completely inconsiderate, and unprofessional. It doesn't sound like much but It really pisses me off to think about it.

[protege]

I nearly didn't wake up from surgery in 1994....

I had a slight hernia before I started college. I wasn't in any pain and it wasn't too serious, but my doctor thought it be taken care of just in case. The surgery was pretty straightforward and was no big deal.

Or so we thought.

Immediately after surgery, as I was in the recovery room, my breathing and heart rate started dropping and I couldn't wake up

My mother went nucking futz. This is someone you do *not* want to piss off, nor do you want her pissed at you. Trust me on this.

She found out that when the nurse took my weight measurements for the "knockout joice" the dumb bitch ignored the measurement...and gave me a *bit* too much. With me, a *little* of that stuff goes a *long* way.

Anyway, as I'm slowly falling into a permanent sleep, the bitch remarked about "what a wuss" I was being. Um, are you effing kidding me? Let's just say my mother, who is been a nurse for 30-odd years, and runs a clinic for the county health department, and has some *serious* connections...was *not* happy.

She literally dragged the nurse into the room, and told her that if I didn't wake up, she'd be in some *serious* shit. (Keep in mind that my mother doesn't curse often, but when she does...you don't want to be around. Speaking from personal experience here...)

I have no idea what they did, but I eventually woke up, and the bitch lost her job. Apparently, my mother complained to not only the hospital board, but the county health department as well...and got her fired.

But, things didn't stop there. Because of my reaction to that, when I got my wisdom teeth out, I wasn't allowed to get knocked completely out. All I got was a local numbing. Trust me, you *really* don't want to see the tools and other things going in and out of your mouth during that operation

[RecoveringKinkoid]

People make mistakes, and nurses are people. However, to lie about something like that, knowing it could possibly put someone's life in danger, is unforgivable. She should not be working a job where people's lives are in her hands if she has such little regard for those lives.

I hate doctors. I hate nurses. I don't hate them personally. Personally, I like a great many of them. But ultimately, I hate being at their mercy. I hate the idea that they could get careless and kill me or my loved ones. I hate that fact that sometimes they are too arrogant to admit they might be wrong. I hate that I don't entirely trust them but I am routinely forced to pretend I do.

A Rromany word for doctor is mushmelengro. Literally, it means "maker of dead men."

[thegiraffe]

I'm surprised your mom didn't sock the nurse. My dad would have gotten VERY serious and intense, and mom would have been a basketcase. I had hernia surgery when I was 2 months old (I know - rare for a female infant), and I'm sure my parents were flipping out, as I'm their first, they were 24 years old, and they were sure they had lost me when mom was pregnant with me.

As for the nurse, I hope they revoked her nursing license too, and put a note on her file so she can never be so much as a dental hygenist or work in a doctor's office/hospital again. Doom her to the world of retail for the rest of her existence! (That, or charge her with gross negligence, which she is undoubtedly guilty of). OK, I watch WAY too much Law and Order.

EDIT: I saw this on my homepage, and it made me think of this bitch:




NOTE: I'm not at all trying to make light of a sucky situation - I just saw this as fitting.