Here’s some stuff we’re reading online this week:

In one of the health systems that I interface with nurses can no longer document that they held a patient’s medications based on ‘nursing judgment’. Such an instance might be when a patient had hypotension from pain medication and thus the morning anti-hypertensive is held. Instead, they need an order from a physician to hold such medication. Further, something like ‘Tylenol’ on a patient’s medication record ordered for fever could not be administered by the nurse for a headache if the patient requested it because that would be ‘practicing medicine without a license’.  A nurse cannot order a social services consult, flush a urinary catheter should it become clogged, refer a patient for diabetes education, etc., etc., without an order from the supervising physician.

That’s from a smart, if somewhat depressing, blog post at Nurse Story called “Independent Nursing Practice: Reality or Still the ‘Physician’s Hand’?” The writer, Terri Schmitt, goes on to wonder just how nurses can carve out areas of independent practice, even in the most basic matters. Good questions.

And here’s a question of interpretation raised by an incident in Colorado involving a nurse and the policeman who stopped her for speeding:

When Colorado Springs cardiac nurse Miriam Leverington was stopped for speeding, she grumbled to the police officer.

“I hope you are not ever my patient,” she reportedly told him.

What happened next has become a topic of widespread debate in Colorado and on the blogosphere. The police officer, Duaine Peters, complained to the […]

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