Nurses spend more time with patients than most other types of providers and have unique insight into patient care and the the healthcare system.

Tubes Don’t Kill Patients, Errors Do

By Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN. Peggy is an infusion practice manager and an occasional contributor to this blog.

by Lars Plougmann/via Flickr

The headline for a recent article in the New York Times caught my attention: U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients. For me, this conjured up pictures of giant tubes with teeth, wrapping around weak patients in their hospital beds and squeezing them. Although I knew exactly what the article was going to discuss, it bothered me that the tubes were given the reputation of being “killers.” Can tubes kill? I think not. Can they contribute to errors? Certainly.

The article explains that numerous patients have been harmed and some have died because clinicians have connected tubing that should not have been connected. These errors run the gamut from enteral feedings being given intravenously and blood pressure inflation devices being attached to IV lines, to administration of intravenous medications into epidural lines.

However, it remains the clinician’s responsibility to provide safe care. […]

2018-03-13T10:51:09-04:00September 10th, 2010|nursing perspective|4 Comments
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With Inadequate Staffing, ‘Nonessential’ Care Goes First–Then Patient Safety

A coworker of mine made a medication error a few weeks ago. It was a multifactorial error—the medication had been ordered wrong, labeled wrong, and administered wrong—and was investigated accordingly. That particular nurse was also “tripled,” with two ICU trauma patients and one critically ill medical resident patient. The nurse’s workload wasn’t factored into the documentation or investigation of the error, though, since the nurse manager didn’t consider it relevant. I heard her say, “An extra patient shouldn’t make any difference in the standard procedure for passing medications.”

2016-11-21T13:15:51-05:00September 8th, 2010|Ethics, nursing perspective, nursing research, safe staffing|7 Comments
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Nightingale, One More Time

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I know we’ve written a lot about Florence Nightingale on this blog recently (see Susan Hassmiller’s series of posts, In Florence’s Footsteps: Notes from a Journey) and I don’t want to put off those who aren’t necessarily fans, but I came across an editorial written by Gloria Donnelly, editor-in-chief of Holistic Nursing Practice, that resonated with me.  She writes about how the holistic nature of Nightingale’s approach fits with much that’s going on today in health care reform, citing as one example the trend toward teaching people to take charge of their own health. (The entire Fall issue highlights the work of holistic practitioners—I especially liked Garden Walking for Depression: A Research Report.)

Donnelly writes:

We believe that Ms. Nightingale, an advocate of health, self-healing, and healthy environments, would be proud of the strides that nurses have made to promote holistic health and care around the world. . . . Nightingale believed that ’health nursing‘ and cultivating good health were equally important to ’sick nursing,’ the art and principles of which she developed almost single-handedly. Prevention superceded cure in Nightingale’s schema as she advocated for Health Missioners to work, first in the villages of rural India and then in England, teaching women how to prevent disease and maintain healthy environments.

This, in a nutshell, describes nursing at its core. It’s a shame that of all of Nightingale’s philosophies and improvements that were […]

2016-11-21T13:15:54-05:00September 2nd, 2010|health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Back to School: Team Sports and Concussions

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Concussions among young athletes are on the rise—are parents and coaches taking them too lightly?

My sons played ice hockey and football in their high school years, what my husband and I referred to as “collision sports.” The unmistakable sound of helmet-hitting-helmet always made me cringe, especially in hockey where a good skater can generate considerable speed (and therefore force) before impact. I’ve witnessed many players being helped off the ice. The coach, who knew I was a nurse, would sometimes signal to me to come to the bench and check out a player. Most of the time, the player was fine; but there were a few times when it was clear that the player was a bit more than just shaken up.

I recall one 12-year-old who had nystagmus and ringing in his ears and kept asking the same question in a slow, sleepy voice. The coach wanted to put him back out on the ice (“He just saw a few stars, right?”), but instead I sent him with his parents to the ED for evaluation. After an overnight stay in the hospital he was released, but was cautioned not to play hockey for two weeks because he’d suffered a concussion. So he waited two weeks and […]

2016-11-21T13:15:56-05:00September 1st, 2010|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Dog Days of August Blog Roundup

What are nurses blogging about this August? (And why do they call these the “dog days”?) A random sampling of what crossed our desks:

The labor and delivery RN who writes the blog At Your Cervix has a nice short post this week on a team of nurses working together to avert a potential catastrophic event.

Artist, writer, nurse, JParadisiRN has a new post that takes the Steven Slater flight attendant incident as a jumping-off point to discuss what drives nurses crazy and unnecessarily slows down work flow. Her answer, in this post at least: waiting for the physician’s order.

Nursetopia writes of a few of her favorite things about being a nurse. (Preprinted physician order forms are one of them, to refer back to the previous post mentioned… So is working on Christmas Day.)

GuitarGirl RN asks why, why, why about the patients who come to the ER where she works. Why do they believe the Internet over the advice of their physicians? Why do they see a crisis when nothing is happening? And so on…

Ok, and just to balance things out, here’s one from Anonymous Doc, who asks why people in the end stages of terminal illness go on believing in long-shot treatments, and physicians go on giving them, despite the fact that he’s never seen a single one result in a miracle. In other words, when is hope justified, and when is it less […]

2016-11-21T13:16:04-05:00August 18th, 2010|nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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