Unwritten Rules of ER

photo by-nixxphotography



Syndicated from Madness-Tales of an Emergency Room Nurse


1) If you come in on a backboard you will have to go to the bathroom within minutes of arrival.

2) If you come in with a probable broken hip you will have to to the bathroom immediately on arrival.

3) If you order food you will be too busy to eat it.

4) Xrays that were done in a nursing home of that broken hip will never come with the patient to the hospital. They will have to be done again.

5) If your patient overdosed on pills and you have to do a gastric lavage, they will always have eaten a disgusting meal before they took the pills.

6) If you get a loud, obnoxious drunk, detox will be full.

7) If one person comes up to the triage window to ask how much longer it will be, it will have a domino effect and everybody in the waiting room will come up there too.

8) If your pro football team is any good at all, you will slow down during the games.

9) If you wear any kind of new uniform or shoes someone will bleed, vomit or pee on them.

10) If you are the charge nurse and go to the bathroom, your phone will ring.

11) If you are having a horrible, busy day, at least one of your frequent flyers will show up. (Its like they have radar or something)

12) If you have a patient who is crashing, ICU tell you they have to transfer a patient to take yours.

13) Its true that when the moon is full, or there is a change in barometric pressure, the weirdos come out of the woodwork.

14) At some point in your time in ER, an embarrassing relative, old boyfriend, hated friend will come in while you're working.

15) When you are really, really busy, one of the following things will happen: the computer will go down, the tube system will go down, a lab machine will go down,
the hospital down the street will go on divert.

Facebook almost got me fired!

Syndicated from allnurses.com May 9, 2011

This is a story from a lady about her Facebook experience. She writes it as a warning for all.

Hi AN family,

This topic has been discussed throughout many threads but I wanted to designate a single thread to this issue. I am a Facebook junkie just like many people from my generation.

I would never post anything patient related or anything that would breach HIPAA. I posted a very tongue-in-cheek status about the daily struggles of nursing (such as drug seeking patients, non-compliant patients, and the patients with a grand sense of entitlement to name a few).

It was meant to be sarcastic and humorous. Well, long story short, HR got a hold of it and almost fired me for it. They said it made me look like a cold, callous nurse and that doesn't sit well with their core values as a facility.

My point of this thread is to be extremely careful about what you post on the internet. My page was as private as it could be but they managed to view it through a "friend's" page.

Luckily, I was able to keep my job and learned a valuable lesson. Don't post work related ANYTHING on your social networking sites.

Do you post about work on Facebook and have you ever been reprimanded?

NYSNA Workshop: Avoid Medication Errors

picture by Renjith Krishnan

May 26 Avoid Medication Errors
NYSNA Headquarters, 11 Cornell Road, Latham, NY

Objectives
•Identify the rights of medication administration as it relates to nursing practice.

•Develop a system to decrease distraction when administering multiple medications.

•Identify common adverse drug errors and how to prevent them.

•Discuss several methods to decrease dosage calculation errors and IV calculation.

•Discuss the action and use of selected drug categories.

•Develop methods to increase error prevention in medication administration.


Click here to Enroll in the Workshop!

Hospital Error Rate

"Just this month, The Journal Health Affairs released a study that found one out of every three patients admitted to a hospital suffered some kind of injury due to a medical error."

"The Obama administration is calling on hospitals and medical centers to meet two major goals by the end of 2013: to reduce medical mistakes by 40 percent and reduce preventable hospital readmission rates by 20 percent."

"Obama administration officials say the overall goal is to prevent nearly 2 million patient injuries and save more than 60,000 lives over the next three years. They also save the program could reduce health costs up to $35 billion, including $10 billion the Medicare program over that same time frame."

You can read the entire article over at MPR.org

National Nurses Week

National Nurses Week is May 6-12.

NursingWorld.org has some great ideas to promote nursing.

What are your plans?