By Gail M. Pfeifer, MA, RN, AJN news director

by Ian Muttoo/via Flickr

I was appalled as I read the Narrative Matters column by physician Charlotte Yeh in the June issue of Health Affairs, for two reasons. Aside from the compassion I felt for her suffering at being hit by a car on a rainy Washington, D.C., evening in 2011, I was dismayed that most of her story took place in an ED, one of the settings in which I used to work. While there, she met with a series of omissions that included not just medical care omissions but also—though she never explicitly connects the dots—basic and serious nursing care omissions.

It saddens me to think that one of the things I fought so hard to implement on our unit more than 20 years ago—transforming the staff’s automatic labeling of arriving patients (an MI, an MVA, a gunshot wound) into a unique picture of who that patient really was under those traumatic circumstances—has still not come to pass. Yet that change of vision is so important to completing the picture and arriving at an accurate diagnosis. Noting that her care demanded a better balance of necessary […]