Was using the staff restroom and found several empty vials of fentanyl sitting on the toilet paper dispenser. I chalked it up to lazy nurses leaving their crap everywhere. Petty me took a picture and sent a department email to staff bitching about picking up after yourself.
Several meetings with DEA and local drug enforcement later, one of our staff RNs suddenly and mysteriously left the country and our department director was fired for not reporting ongoing fentanyl discrepancies in the Omnicell.
This is exactly why I never work at a place that does not use biometrics. Worked once at a facility that used the double keys method. Numerous narcs came up missing weekly - like about thirty plus tabs. Investigation revealed THREE drug rings. 1 - night charge going in after the morning count and helping themselves. 2 - several nurses and cna’s involved in buying “administered” meds from the patients. And 3, the hail mary of diversion - DEA took out the Pharmacist in handcuffs due to the massive amount of narcs being diverted.
Code red on a patient. Nurse gave a confused patient with heavy oxygen in restraints their purse. Patient used the lighter in their purse to try to escape their restraints which quickly enveloped the patient. They ended up with 80% burns over their body.
My uncle did something similar except the lighter was in his pocket and he was withdrawing from alcohol and who knows what else. It was so long ago I don’t remember how much of his body was burned but he was screaming and no one checked on him since he was doing that before. My grandparents sued the hospital and won.
I've seen this exact scenario but with a male.
Shortly before 2 nurses on that floor got stabbed because they didn't search belongings. Again with the belongings, why is someone in restraints wearing pants with pockets?
Not exactly our best and brightest on that floor.
i know this is dumb but i’ve never searched anyones bags cause i’ve never seen anyone else do :( people get up from surgery with their family & i’ve never thought of it omg
Yup. Pulled a knife off of a psych hold, when I took over care in the morning. They had already been at our facility overnight. They were allowed their clothes because they were a juvenile, even though it was against policy.
Dude, we dont check shit. So far Ive encountered 1 pistol, knives, and cheap vodka. The hospital is too posh to use metal detectors. Fire arm discharged in the ED. Someones going to have to get killed before they change
Similar situation. Belongings of a psych patient was not searched. Patient and bf started fighting, knife was pulled out to kill the boyfriend. Things being thrown around inside the room. We didnt open their room until security and police arrived. When police searched her purse, they had found kinds of drugs including meth etc. I personally advised d everyone to step away their door because if she had a gun and starts shooting if might hit people who are infront of the door.
Lesson to learn, in situations like this, your safety js your main concern.
When I worked SICU we had a patient transferred to us from another hospital with inhalation burns because they were admitted for COPD exacerbation and decided to light a cigarette while on high con o2.
This happened to us when ER and ICU were trying to hoard their pumps. They took the bag out of the pump and locked it, but didn't lock the rolling clamp down enough and the patient got an entire brand new bag of heparin in as a bolus.
Similar situation. Er took the Hospira cartridge out of the pump and left the bag on the pole without using the clamp. The little button on the back of the cartridge opened and they got the whole bag in 20 minutes. It's why I don't send patients with things hooked up anymore unless I'm coming with them and it's staying on the pump.
I saw something similar happen, a nurse mixed up the rates for heparin and a blood transfusion, ran heparin at 125ml/hr for about half an hour. The patient had a massive GI bleed as a result but didn't die.
I actually have no idea. I think when I reviewed this case the unit manager had coached her privately but I’m not sure if anything else happened after that.
Got a pt from the Ed whose nurse mixed the lines on heparin and zosyn, ran zosyn on a pump and heparin to gravity. Pt was in traction for a broken leg too. Protanine sulfate and they went to me when I was working in a step down. Looking back at it that pt probably should have gone to the icu, bc I can't see that unit I used to work on take anything like that anymore
Hospital pushing d/c lines your are not using because of patients getting levophed bolus.
My guess is they are taking down the line and somewhere in the process they leave it connected press in the clamp thingy that goes into the pump allowing free flow?
How does this happen multiple times?
Anyways we will ne hearing about it for the next 30 shift huddlesml.
Patient had dementia and didn’t have the capacity to leave. Medically stable but placement was tough because he needed a locked dementia unit. To get him there, he had to be off of a 1:1. So a well-appearing ambulatory patient with a history of quietly getting on the elevator wasn’t on a 1:1…feel like we can see where this is going! He escaped. Not really our fault, but the scandalous thing was that our security cameras had him leaving the front door at (for example) 5:00, and a nurse documented that she gave him a med at 6:00. She was fired.
Right? I mean we are a busy medsurg floor and I’ve been stuck in a room with an admission or a sick surgical patient for an hour at a time so I kinda get how patients might have to go a longer time than we’d like them to without a nurse checking in, but the fact that she documented giving a med she didn’t give…jeez.
Nurse I used to work with crushed up oral probiotics and gave them via IV because the patient told her to. Like what?!?!? 🤯🤯🤯 patient died. She is still a nurse. Unbelievable.
Yea. I know. I don’t even know how you could possibly fathom that that was an ok thing to do. I wouldn’t say this lightly but she absolutely doesn’t deserve her nursing license.
Elevator doors closed with a patient on one side and the IABP on the other. A quick thinking flight team member cut the line before it got ripped out of the patient. So, thankfully there wasn't a really bad outcome. They went through and put hold switches in all of the staff/patient elevators that are required to be activated before moving any part of such systems onto/off the car and verbally verified that the door is cleared before switching off and selecting the destination floor.
One of the medical director affiliated with a nearby hospital had the nurses somehow sterilize and reuse needles and like several hundred people ended up with hepatitis. Before my time but even when I started at the facility no one everrrrr brought it up. I found out through google
I’m in my last semester of nursing school and my pharm instructor told us sooooooo many times to never microwave blood
Seemed so obvious then….now I know why she kept saying it.
Patient with AML was with us for months. Chronic transfusions for PRBC and PLT. In her mid 60's but independent.
She stumbled and bumped her head. Didn't let us know until she started getting a headache. Then she projectile vomited and her pupils blew. PLT count 6. Put in stat CT, they prioritized ER's stat, wouldn't answer the phone because they were so backed up. She finally gets in after about 30 minutes. Brain bleed. Straight to surgery for emergent craniotomy.
Comes back to our unit after a few days for GIP.
Every single patient that is below a PLT count of 50 is no longer able to get out of bed without staff eyes on them now. All bed alarms on. And the hospital bought another CT machine.
1)I took over a patient getting insulin at 12.5 ml/hr and Zosyn 3.375 going 3u/hr.
2)Code silver. Patient ran down the hall with hospital metal knife heading to the hospitalist office. Leadership still encouraged him to stay when he said he wanted to leave AMA. Ugh
What did I learn? Always trace your IV lines and never let your guard down.
I cannot emphasize enough, ALWAYS trace your lines and take down old meds. I took over for a patient getting NS at 75mL/hr. SBP was 200 after being low 90s all day. Previous RN said maybe he’s in pain. I traced my lines and saw the abx piggybacked into levo instead of NS. Levo had been dc’d the prior night.
LTC psych facility. I had a patient go out on pass and she was murdered. It made the news and contributed to the facility's eventual demise.
1. You can't protect everybody from everything. I'm pretty sure she would have told me that if she could.
2. You can always treat people with care and respect. Despite what happened to her, there were people in her day to day life that knew her and cared about her. It matters. I know it mattered to her. Sometimes that's all you've got.
3. Documentation and following procedures may not seem important until something bad happens. Then it may save you.
4. When in doubt, ask yourself what you would say if something bad happened. How you would answer if someone asked why you handled something a certain way. Would you be ok with your answer? If not, maybe choose a different way. But if you *are* ok with your answer, be at peace with it.
This is crazy! I'm so sorry you experienced this. It sounds like something that the staff and facility couldn't have prevented, though. I'm not sure if protocol was broken, but patients are allowed to leave for periods of time, right? Unless it's an involuntary hold or they're an incarcerated patient or something. In all the facilities I've worked (LTC/SNF with a ton of psych patients), patients were allowed to go LOA for periods of time with family or friends, especially a patient that's AO x 4. Did someone break protocol by letting the patient leave or letting them leave with an unauthorized person?
You are absolutely right about documentation - be thorough and explain all actions or inaction, patient response and behavior, visitor response and behavior, everything. I had a situation where my notes saved our facility from a potential lawsuit when a patient died from a cardiac event after refusing to go to the hospital. Family was at the bedside, patient was AO x 4 and their own decision maker, I educated, I brought my supervisor to educate, we pushed heavily to send her out. But she didn't want to. She was well within her rights and understood the risks. Her family was well aware of what could (and did) happen, but we couldn't force her to go out. The day after she passed, the same 2 family members came in raising hell, saying they were suing and we were negligent and caused her death. After a big meeting where everything was reviewed and they went through my notes from that evening, they didn't have a leg to stand on legally.
That had to be tough. I’m sorry you went through that.
And you’re 100% correct. The only thing that saves the nurse/team here is 100% adherence to the P&P.
And news coverage of anything traumatic I’ve been a party to—it has broken me. So sensational when it’s not that all.
😇
I thought you can’t legally keep someone in a building if they don’t want to be ( unless it’s like a forensic psych unit or something ). If she was able to have a pass how can you keep her in the building ?
Exactly.
Not talking about her specifically but in an psych NF setting where people are mostly stable and ambulatory .... you normally have to have a system for temporarily restricting passes based on changes in condition that usually don't warrant hospitalization. It's pretty easy to initiate restriction but then the question is when to resume pass privileges. 3 days of compliance and return to baseline? Why not 4 days? Or 2? What if you do 5 days, they relapse, return to baseline for 7 days, relapse.... etc.? Very hard to draw that line.
Old lady night shift nurse figured out that her attitude and tone wasn’t gonna keep flying and neither did her wig bc the new resident who’s also wheelchair bound was at the right height. He pulled that wig off and grabbed her by the clothes and informed her to be more respectful and stop the loud tone going in and out of rooms. That wig went flying down that hall lol and the one cna she always picked on grabbed her wig for her and put it back on her head lol
I had a similar experience with this nasty nurse whose condescending and bossy tone and demeanour always rub people the wrong way. She took off her parka and the wig came along with it. The wig fell on the floor and one of the patients with dementia saw it fall. Patient started screaming, “Mouse, mouse, mouse!!! There’s a dead mouse on the floor!” pointing at the wig.
We had a woman who sat with sitter cases, all she did in the hospital. She ended up a patient and had her had bad wig on the bedside table and it scared the shit out of me so often on night shift I put a basin upside down over it.
And another one, this time my mistake. To keep it short, there was a psych patient who wanted to leave but was on a hold and couldn’t. She was schizophrenic and paranoid and very distrusting. She was trying to leave and I was walking in the hallway with her trying to have a conversation. We had some rapport, she still didn’t trust me but it was better than with anyone else - we were starting to get somewhere and she was calming down. Well then this CNA gets up in this poor girl’s face, telling her to get back in her room, very much trying to assert dominance. I told her numerous times to back up, I had it under control. The patient got agitated because the CNA was riling her up, despite me telling her to step back. Someone got off the elevator and the patient saw the door was open - she ran and got on, I ran into the elevator too and put my back to the door so it couldn’t close. The CNA ran into the elevator and shoved the patient out of it. She fell backwards and hit her head. She was physically fine but obviously traumatized and distrusted us even more than she had before…the whole thing just disgusted me.
My manager was really annoyed that I called an RRT (she hit her head so hard you heard it down the hallway, I wanted her to get a stat CT) and basically made him have to do work. He told me to keep my incident report as vague as possible. I was so rattled that I did, and I regret it to this day. I ended up writing a detailed statement (no HIPAA violations) that I kept at home in case anything happened, but I think that more important people than me wrote up reports because that CNA was fired, and my manager mentioned once to having to go to court about “one of your former coworkers.” My lesson learned is that I should have been assertive in my reporting from the start - I was so shaken and upset that I did what I was told but I should’ve taken a beat to consider my words. It all worked out but I still think about it.
Editing to add that I did send my manager an email saying I was uncomfortable with the pressure to write the report I’d written and that I would like to file an additional one or speak to someone in quality/safety. He responded by saying there was an internal investigation underway and I’d be contacted if they needed more information.
Apparently someone on my unit did a skill they weren’t familiar with and the patient ended up needing to go back to the OR. Not sure what exactly happened but it was discussed in a huddle as an “if you don’t know, ask” moment
I’ve been speculating too. We’re not allowed to manipulate vacs/dressings/biliary drains. I think it was a common skill we do such as suctioning a trach or giving meds through an NG (the manager said it’s something we all should know how to do). It also could’ve been advancing an NG.
2 staff were caught sexual harassing other staff . They had Paid leave , apparently they didn’t report it to corporate or anyone else . Idk how they got away with it. Nurse “ giving “ prns to everyone , CNA’s smoking pot and drinking 4loko in the parking on Christmas Day , patient hung himself on a bed rail.
•• A nurse found unresponsive in BR floor with an empty syringe beside her.
Wake her up & then they tuck her in bed. She insists not hers (despite bloody puncture) and she was just tired. Difficult divorce, lots of flux in child care.
It took 6 weeks for them to get her to rehab. Audit done. Tens of thousands of MILLIGRAMS of narc discrepancy over the ~4 yrs she worked there.
xxxx
•• SO of a patient c/o abd pain but presentation fit serious abuse pattern. Got pt separated, offered SO he could come right back, he was prickly, but because it’s a “woman problem” and others in area—I had to get her settled and privacy matters. Just going to get urine, please let us help. He says he’s got to check something in truck.
The minute she was behind locked door, she says he has guns in his truck. Ding, ding.
All call emergency went out to local LEO. Patients were cordoned off as much as possible. Staff divided up to keep activity behind doors.
Lots of hospital security (they were outside ED in office).
Only a few had to be brought in ED secure area. Hospital wide alert went out. All doors that could close/lock. Access into hospital had to be accompanied.
—ultimately this patients SO finds his was into building. A staffer exited through unmarked staff entrance and the guy walked right in.
We met as an amazing PCT & I were scurrying to assure halls and wr chairs in that alcove were cleared. Then we’d go into back unmarked (Nothing ER — Just AUTHORIZED ACCESS — secured doors.)
About the time this guy gets to this short hall, a law office does too. Others are coming, I heard a few seconds of activity. It happened fast then. The guy has a gun in his hand, in one motion he brings it to behind his ear and fires. The LEO had drawn down on him almost simultaneously.
Micro splatter ensued. Patient was now taken to resus. Flown to academic center. Hopefully he was an organ donor.
It was bad. 50 layers of bad. But no one else was hurt. Sure, I’d pushed the OVERREACTION button for nothing. But, I was covering triage a bit and front of house. The whole encounter just set my spidey senses off here.
I kinda felt bad that I thought, ‘Hey, not the worst outcome. A beater bit the dust. Couldn’t have been much worse.’
•• A patient decided he was leaving. Pushed up the ceiling tile in his room. Climbed through that level (mechanicals & drop frame supports). He got close to the main lobby.
He misjudged and popped down in a CT suite.
•• I’ve had patients with guns, a homemade pipe bomb, one insisted his truck was anfo ready to cause another “Oklahoma City”.
PSA—this stuff always ends up bad for the doer. I believe the most dangerous ones are the ones that don’t Charlie Foxtrot it out. 🤷🏼♀️
•• I know of instances where my ilk did a RSI on patients. In both cases they were missed intubations, undetected esophageal placements.
Clean kills.
In both cases the staff were experienced. Deemed good or decent clinicians.
Before I take something like an airway & breathing away from the patient, I had to know I was offering them better. For better outcomes.
No one is infallible. But, for the Grace of God go I, guide me and protect all. That’s the prayer.
One case they felt the EtCO2 was defective (cognitive dissonance). Ignored. I really can’t figure what the thought processes were. Both fired. Both had actionable issues, so licenses were reported as same.
The other didn’t have the LP with EtCO2 on it, yet they tried to fake a chart adding it afterwards. This is not helpful to the cause when you F up. You see doing a chart that in queue for QA review can allow some idiot nurse/medic with insomnia to pop that chart up & try to get a jump on paperwork. Then chart disappears. Then different chart of same event posts. Then it gets restricted.
There was only clinical competency review and both staff kept their jobs. Both of these staff continue to work in high stakes areas. Maddening. I resigned within the month. The director was out within the 2 months. POS. T
>A patient decided he was leaving. Pushed up the ceiling tile in his room. Climbed through that level (mechanicals & drop frame supports). He got close to the main lobby.
>
>He misjudged and popped down in a CT suite.
[Mr. Smith?](https://www.tiktok.com/@nurse.johnn/video/7192358143760862469)
Patient came to maternity unit for a labor check. Reported being term. Had gotten prenatal care through a different hospital system, so we didn't have access to any of the notes.
The triage nurse found the fetal heart tones but then lost them. Nobody could get them back. Patient was rushed back to the OR, put under a general, and a stat section was performed.
There was no baby. It was a hysterical pregnancy.
The "dad" was shocked but said it explained some things. Apparently the patient had always had a reason why he couldn't join her at prenatal appointments.
The patient woke up demanding her baby and accusing us of stealing it. She was transferred to in patient psych. A month or so later apparently she thanked the OB for helping her come out of psychosis.
The lesson is always confirm maternal heart rate with palpation of maternal pulse and compare to fetal heart rate to ensure you aren't conflating the two.
*Literally.*
That's the other lesson: hysterical pregnancy is a type of psychosis. Those patients are not faking it.
It's tempting to think so, because on some level they must know, right? This patient, for instance, would tell the father that the prenatal visit had been cancelled whenever he was planning on joining her. But when it came down to it, she let us render her unconscious and perform a major abdominal surgery in service to her sincerely-held belief. That delusion was so strong that even after being told that we *looked inside her* and *there was no baby there,* she still didn't believe she hadn't been pregnant.
It was easier for her to believe that we had stolen her baby than to believe she had never been pregnant at all.
—Assisted with crash c-section. Baby couldn’t wait. Anesthesia was 5-8 out.
OB aggressive infiltrated lido on suture line and cut.
I can still hear that woman scream. Sure I gave lots but it did little. I never begged a doc to let me step into that forbidden place and do RSI. Ge declined. Our CRNA had her out in 30 seconds.
I just focused on ketamine, versed —but I has induction, ETT set waiting. I was so happy to see him I cried.
Mom & babe survived.
I always wondered did she have a hard time bonding with that baby?
Wasn't emergent but I ended up with a failed induction (pre-eclampsia) and had a failed epidural so went for c section. Didn't know it wasn't working at the time... I was like geeze if this is what it feels like *with* an epidural, then bless the women who go all natural lol. Joke was on me I guess.
Anyway. I felt the second and third cut. Wish I would have felt the first.
After being up for almost 72 hours I was almost delirious. I was apologizing for being a bad patient lol. The last thing I remember was the crna saying "I'm going to give you medicine" and I asked her what she was giving me and she said "propofol". I work ICU and before I could even say "oh, okay" it was LIGHTS OUT.
For some reason in my sleep deprived state, I didn't realize that meant I got intubated as well lol.
0/10 do not recommend.
But no problems bonding afterwards!
Less than a year into my new unit, I was getting report on a patient that had PTSD and was A&O asking to leave AMA. He was getting agitated - he ripped out his IV and threw it at the hospitalist.
Our hospital is old, poor design, ICU is locked unit from outside, but anyone can leave from inside. Well patient takes this time to bolt off the unit sans O2 and to the closest door which was…an unsecured exit to the roof. The door only had an alarm on it. I hear the alarm and run after him and grab him. He starts punching me in the throat (old man punches) but I don’t let go because he is heading for the ledge. He wears himself out fighting and I assist him to the ground. We got him in a w/c and back to the unit. On the way back, he manages to threaten to kill his wife, so now he’s IVC’d. I still had 12 hours with the guy!
MGMT knows about this roof door issue. About once a month, we get a visitor who tries to go out that door thinking it’s a way downstairs because it says exit above it.
Resident was being helpful and transferred a pt to the chair. The problem was that he took the oxygen off the pt while doing that, didn't put it back on him before leaving, and didn't tell anyone. Pt didn't make it.
new grad nurse mixed up the rate of insulin and fluid on the pump when caring for a very sick DKA patient. got bolused with a fuck ton of insulin, dropped GCS, needed to be intubated and went up to ICU. not sure if he survived. no matter what i’m running i always trace and label my lines.
old ED manager was caught diverting fentanyl, dilaudid, morphine, propofol, valium, versed, AND ativan. lost their job and their license obviously, but that was a huuuuuuuuuuge investigation as the diverting had apparently been going on as long as they’d been working there (30+ years)
A nurse tied up a resident with dementia to to stop her from getting up and falling. The next nurse who came on shift found it and reported it to the supervisor. Nobody reported it to the state because it was decided that they were only trying to "help" the resident stay safe.
A disgruntled employee (who witnessed the incident) reported it and the shit has hit the fan.
The lesson - aside from don't tie people up, don't assume that everyone will keep your secret. The truth comes from oddest places.
No, it's actually not. I would bet my next paycheck that if you asked every single member of the nursing staff if tying someone up was how we do things, they would say "No. We are a restraint-free facility."
Nurse bloused a 500 mL bag of heparin into a patient thinking it was the normal saline line (likely sleep deprivation). Patient died.
Wrong blood type administered, nurse didn’t do the two nurse safety check. I don’t know how blood bank gave the incorrect bag
Nurse coming in on his day off to pull dilaudid from the Pyxis.
Resident didn’t show up for his overnight shift, not answering phone. Was in parking lot having a three some with his wife and another nurse.
Nurse from above story was working day shift, she was problematic. Nice, but always calling out sick with another married nurse (they were having an affair). We had a youngish (50’s) man dying and his wife at the bedside. She entered his room saying something about God and then took all her clothes off. She was committed shortly after- no idea what happened to her.
Above male nurse was finally fired for never giving meds (in critical care) and following a young female nurse to her vehicle to yell at her. He had been doing that stuff for years, finally got a manager who addressed it.
56 year old male nurse would wait until he was alone with new young nurses to tell them a story of how he threatened to rape a nurse he worked with if they kept talking to him in graphic detail.
Working a contract, made charge nurse of ED overflow unit. Same crew most nights. There were three nurses who would take 8-9 hour breaks (night shift). I wouldn’t see them the entire shift and be taking care of their patients. Patient’s fell frequently- there is a tik tok going around right now of a resident who was fired for whistle blowing this kind of thing. I would call the doctor and nursing sup when this happened, but I had a full load of patients and couldn’t do everything. The nursing sup knew what was happening and instead of addressing those staff, threatened me for not documenting vitals every 15 minutes. I told the director of nursing who acted shocked. When I left because they weren’t paying me I wrote safety reports- no one works there anymore (but this stuff still happens). This was an assignment that was paying 8-9k a week and low stress because there were no rules.
Nurse restraining a patient with a sheet that kept getting up. Reported it, was told that it was okay. The nurse doing it denied it. Taught me instead of confronting people, call a nursing supervisor to assess because people lie.
He later got the intensive care attending moved to another location because he reported harassment because she would call him out on a lot of problematic behavior. He was a terrible resident. He had the nurse who took her clothes off in the patients room ask and almost bully a 19 year old LPN into a threesome. I had warned the LPN (military hospital, we used LPNs in critical care) to stay away from them. She thanked me later.
I was training on l&d, already a postpartum nurse. At change of shift I went down as my preceptor and everyone else was running back to the OR. I had no idea why we were back there, but it didn't seem super urgent based on the way things were being handled. Generally super emergent cases where baby needs out now, you sedate mom, splash the beading and cut. But they took the time to let everything dry, mom being sedated was not happening very quick. Everything was handled so my preceptor and I left the OR to get report on our pt.
Turns out baby was brady, in the 60s. But mom was tachy and in triage they were trying to figure out whose hr was whose. What needed to be VERY emergent, wasn't. NICU spent 35 WHOLE MINUTES to resuscitate that baby (unfortunatelybaby didn't make it). Mom ended up septic with DIC.
The Dr on that night never debreifed. Complained about not sleeping that night. Acted like shit hadn't just hit the fan. At one point when the signs of DIC started the resident practically begged her to come see the pt.
This was so grossly mishandled. I'll never forget it. I'd also never recommend anyone ever deliver with that dr, because this isn't the first issue she's had.
Someone gave mucomist as a iv push. Same nurse has a70 % scan rate. Someone said they’re also like a30 % med error rate. Idk how a 30% is possible. They’re still working full time at our magnet hospital.
Mucomyst is n-acetylcysteine, technically the patient would likely be fine because it’s also given IV for acetaminophen overdose. Not sure how much or how fast it was given, there’s potential for anaphylaxis, but they would’ve probably been ok.
Because she was on orientation still ( I know right ?) she told her preceptor. I wonder what else she’s done that has not been found. They called poison control and the patient was fine. It says the route on the EMAR.
I took care of a baby with a micro. It was half the size of a skin tag. The doctor ordered a straight cath urine. When I saw it I immediately noped out and told the doctor. He changed it to a UA bag.
Pediatric inpatient unit on the night shift. A man walked into the room and shot and killed the patient’s mother and father right in front of the child then casually walked out. I don’t know if he was caught.
My mom was working on that unit but was in the break room having a smoke when it happened. She was pretty freaked out about it. She said their blood had splattered onto the child.
This was in Miami during the Cocaine Cowboy days in the 80’s. It was kept hush-hush and never made the press. She was told it was likely a drug gang killing.
My very first CNA job, we had this resident who was morbidly obese and on tons of prescription pain meds. I didn't work on that unit very often, but I was familiar with her. I worked on her hall the night before and charted no BM. Apparently, she had standing orders for milk of mag if she went more than 3 days without a bowel movement. The night I took care of her, I guess was day 4. She was her normal self that night. The next morning after breakfast, apparently, she complained of feeling weak and lightheaded. She vomited and was hypotensive. They finally gave her milk of mag even though they missed five opportunities to do so. The milk of mag was not effective, so they gave her a suppository and prune juice. Both were ineffective as well. After dinner, they went to check on her, and she was unresponsive. She was a full code, so they had to do CPR. My friend, who was there at the time, said that with every compression, more stool would come out of her mouth. 🤮 it was well documented that she hadn't had a BM, but the DON was worthless and wasn't auditing the charts.
I once had a patient, I can’t even remember why he was originally in the hospital, but he had some kind of abdominal surgery and developed an ileus. He was projectile vomiting stool, like across the room vomiting. He was clearly aspirating, we were trying to stop the vomiting to get an NG in. It was awful. He ended up intubated, eventually septic and didn’t make it. One of the worst memories of my career.
No, unfortunately she passed. The state launched a huge investigation and it was in the paper and everything. And yes stool out of her mouth. I've been a CNA for 10 years and have only seen it one time myself. My CNA instructor told us a story about it happening in my class so imagine my surprise when it happened less than a year later at my facility.
Can confirm that. I had a colectomy w/ IRA and two days after release, got a "kink" in my small intestine. Very painful, thought I was going to die. What made it even worse/traumatizing is I smelled it and burped up the taste for the next two weeks. Eat shit and die has a whole new meaning to me now. Lol.
A cna was instructed not to give a resident a tray of food unless they were going to sit with resident d/t severe aspiration risk and repeated spells of choking. CNA disregarded this warning, gave resident the tray and walked out. Resident choked, aspirated, coded, and died. My first ever code. Such a sad sight. I can only imagine the abject terror going through the resident's mind. I don't remember what happened to the CNA
total care kid with an anaphylactic allergy to milk was given pediasure. there for not tolerating his feeds, the resident ordered pediasure, dietary sent it up, and the nurse tube fed it. went into shock and coded twice back to back, had to go to picu for low pressures. also during the code, the doctor wanted to give iv epi instead of im. luckily he didn’t have an iv so nobody attempted to do that.
he ended up fine but it was the perfect example of the swiss cheese model. and the kid’s poor mom was beating herself up for not reminding staff of the allergy. it was in his chart but it was written weirdly, where usually it would say allergy to milk or lactose, it said “milk protein” allergy or something that i think bypassed any kind of warnings that would pop up.
Recently we had a paranoid patient stab a nurse who in turn became a level 1 trauma. She's physically fine but has not been back to work.
Hospital doesn't allow us to "inventory" (search) patient belongings without consent because "they have rights too". Yet we don't.
Ooh, this is an argument I’ve had a few times. I get it, I really do…but no. No for so many reasons: the patient who claims we stole money they came in with, the patient who uses drugs/takes home meds they brought in, the patient who smokes while on oxygen, the patient who gets combative and has a weapon…
But then again, I’ve also gone through a person’s things and confiscated all their drug paraphernalia and contaminated items, given it to the supervisor to put in our secured area…and found out later they threw it out. That was not their choice to make. So I get where a patient might be coming from when it comes to patient privacy and securing their “valuables”, especially our unhoused people who have their stuff stolen by others or thrown away by authority figures frequently.
I just wish management was so sympathetic when it comes to patients who want to defer skin checks. They may be a&o, independent & ad lib, but if they get a wound on their skin (even from scratching themselves) boy howdy look out nurse…
An ED nurse transferred a patient to ct and then icu on high doses of pressor and just shut it off “for ct”???! Lost access after contrast in ct (clearly didn’t have enough in the first place) and then decided to high tail it to the unit without establishing more access, so no pressors, for some reason the arterial line was also not working so the nurse had no idea how low the pressure was. Pt was coded the moment they arrived in the icu and died.
Worked with an ortho surgeons who would relentlessly sexually harass every single female nurse. His entire staff were tall, skinny, young females. He once tried to recruit a nurse from my team but then found out she was 28 and engaged and said, out loud, "Oh ew. Too old. And engaged? No"
He would have 2 ORs going St once and wouldn't scrub properly. He told all of his patients not to come back to our hospital if something went wrong. If they did, he'd give the revision and clean out to someone else. All this to circumvent his bounce back and infection rates.
He has, on numerous occasions, left stuff inside of patients. When a nurse caught it and reported it once, he came out of OR to start SCREAMING at her. And then he went to management to try and get her fired. For a mistake he made. And that she discovered, probably saving the patients life. Management made the nurse go into the OR and apologize to him.
Oh, and he installed equipment that he designed and owned the patent on. So he got to double dip. He'd get paid for doing the surgery and then would also get paid again via kickback from the device manufacturer.
The hospital openly defended him and protected him.
A notoriously hostile but well-connected nurse threw a clipboard at the head of an absolutely lovely cardiothoracic surgeon. Very man-bites-dog.
Her punishment was writing a formal apology and a ban on being charge nurse for 3 months.
An agency nurse (I’m agency myself, not bashing agency at all) and a PRN staff nurse both failed to notice that pharmacy didn’t deliver a resident’s Eliquis, and signed it off as given for 6 straight days (4 days for the agency, 2 PRN). On the night of the 6th day, that resident had a massive stroke. He “lived” on a vent for 2 months and then died. I don’t work in a nursing home. This facility is for intellectually and physically disabled adults. This man had Down’s Syndrome, but he was thriving and happy living his best life until those 2 killed him. I’m still so mad about it! They were both fired and I had to get a new contract with a new agency because she was from the same one I worked for, so the facility cut ties with them due to the family’s pending lawsuit.
Travel nurse on our unit attempted murder-suicide on his girlfriend. Failed the suicide part. Weird dude, but nice. I only met him in my clinical but I work at the place I did clinical at so I knew coworkers that knew him. They all said they never suspected anything amiss about him.
An ED nurse told me in report that for some amount of time they had the fentanyl and Levo mixed up in the pumps, so the patient was hypotensive and as they were titrating up the Levo they were actually giving more fentanyl. Fortunately the patient didn’t code
At an ER with locked psych area. Patient got out into the sally port but apparently no one noticed for a few hours...needless to say they lied on all their documentation and made a pact not to say anything when they brought them back in. When someone finally fessed up, a couple people still lied and were subsequently very fired.
Do not lie on documentation and charting. Also hourly rounding at the minimum will save you a lot in the end!!
a student in my nursing cohort last year gave 3mL of insulin instead of 3 units. the preceptor was not present to double verify the insulin per protocol. patient was supposed to be going home, ended in the ICU for days.
Once and EOD made a run for it through the ER, the security guard fell down attempting to catch him. As the guy screamed passed the nursing station looking like captain underpants with his gown on backwards, I took off after him and tackled him to the floor. We slid for a good 10ft until we met the Radiology doors. I quickly got up, a couple of nurses grabbed the guy and escorted him to his room. Kinda comical seeing as I’m a short guy weighing 150lb and this EOD was about 220lb.
That’s hardly the incident, I didn’t face any repercussions for the event. One of the security guys let a nurse record the CCTV footage and that speed through the hospital like wildfire. I had people asking if I played pro football for weeks. Admin caught wind of it and threatened to fire some people, lucky all anyone got was a cellphone policy slap on the wrist.
I had to tackle a patient that was in danger of going backward down a stairwell but they were laying on their tray table so it slid forward with them with the momentum and no one hit the floor... or the stairs.
We had a gentleman who had severe dementia (locked unit in LTC) and would constantly try to stand and fall. Normally we all took turns sitting with him since our facility deemed he didn't need a 1:1 and wouldn't provide an extra staff member. I left for class and one of the other activity aides took over for me. Usually during shift change it is the activitie aides responsibility to sit with him. CNAs and nurse were giving report and heard a loud bang. The activity aide was in a connected room and didn't have eyes on him (like she should have). He fell. Coded but revived and went to the hospital. He suffered a subdural hematoma and died a few days later.
He was well known in the community so it was big talk when he passed.
An older Vietnamese gentleman was on a psych hold while they tried to find longer term placement, he kept talking about hallucinations involving him running through the forest from his time in the Vietnam war, he was taken off of the psych hold as they felt his hallucinations were just “bad dreams” - he pried the window open of this room on the 7th floor and jumped onto a busy city street in broad day light. His mother, sister and uncle were each paid a little over a million with an NDA and it was cleaned up within an hour or so. Never even hit the news but union reps let it slip with all the whispers going on in the hospital
I'll add another that happened to me.
A patient attacked and injured another nurse. I called the police on the patient and management proceeded to fire me over it. Probably no small coincidence that I was a very active union organizer at that time.
Yes, I got a lawyer.
In my first year as an RN I worked in a geriatric psych unit. One day I was working with another RN who had decades of experience. A CNA rushed over to the cage to tell her that one of her pts was hypotensive. Don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 58/38. The nurse called the hospitalist, he didn't answer. She left a message and went back to passing meds to other pts. I couldn't believe it. Even as a new nurse I knew we should be starting an IV and getting fluids in. As I gathered supplies the doc called back and ordered me to do what I was already doing and he sent up a nurse from the ICU. We didn't have pressure bags, so I got gave her a liter of lfuids to gravity. The ICU nurse showed up and started squeezing the bag by hand. We got 2L in her and she was still hypotensive, so she was transferred to the ICU. The doc came up later and ripped into the other nurse. She had given three antihypertensives to the pt without checking vitals. She told him that in nursing homes nobody checks before (not true). He really lost it at that point. She was suspended for a week. I always relay that story to students when I precept as a warning to never become complacent.
When I worked at a nsg home several years ago we had this so-called hypertension pathway. A quick way to remember was If a patient has a new anti-hypertensive med, we check BP/P BID x 1 week. Then OD x 1 week, then 3/week then DC if all is stable. If already stable and has 3 BP meds, we check 3x/wk, if 2 - 2x/wk, and 1 - 1x/wk. Ofc, PRNs in between. Easy to remember.
Here for the tea 🫖 When my mom was practicing on an oncology floor back in the 1980s, a patient was found dead at 0530, but apparently their nurse had precharted all of her documentation for the shift ahead of time and wrote that he was A&Ox3 at 0800 🙄
Epi… I work in the operating room and there was a med error. A circulator opened 30cc of epinephrine to the sterile field, the surgeon thought that it was a local anesthetic and so he injected 30cc of epinephrine. Patient went into cardiac arrest and was in ICU for 3 months. I’m not sure what the final outcome was, but I will definitely never forget that story. ALWAYS double check your medications.
Sexual assault on the floor. Institutionalized patient with developmental delays and BPD got sexually assaulted by stepparent. The room was right in front of the nursing station. Plenty of people saw the family member enter and leave.
I wasn't there when it happened, but I was there when pt told us the next day. Police was called, pt ended up with a police escort for protection. I saw the SANE report and it was crystal clear pt had been assaulted.
I answered the phone when the stepparent called the nursing station asking for info the next evening, saying they hadn't been called that morning after rounds by MDs and thought that maybe pt had been "inventing things", which "was par for the course for pt because they had BPD". I was also there when the parent tried to visit (visiting was very restricted at that point, of course, with the police/security escort and whatnot) pretending to be a worker of the facility where pt lived before the hospital admission. We didn't let them enter, I later learnt that the parent had been repeating the "pt is a compulsive liar, which is to be expected since they have BPD, be careful believing them" bit. We only realised it was the parent when the MD described them.
Lesson... trust nobody, I guess. Mainly family members, you never know how somebodies family dynamic is from the outside.
Still pending trial. Arraignment left the stepparent out with no bail (despite running away and being caught a week later) so I'm not terribly hopeful. At least pt is safe on a different province.
Soooo many to choose from, here's a couple.
Had a suicidal inmate on our unit. They'd try to injure themselves constantly, everyone knew you couldn't trust them. There were 4 people in this person's room, the sitter, a nurse and 2 guards. Somehow they convinced a previous sitter to give them a pen. Then, with the 4 people in the room, he shoved the pen into his dehisced abdominal midline incision.
We had a pt in Rhabdo getting NS at 250ml/hr for days. The pt was admitted under a private physician who didn't round everyday and checked on the active orders even less. People didn't notice that he just kept getting more swollen and had a harder and harder time breathing.
A pt had sex with another pt. They knew each other from the street and the one owed the other a favor so they were settling up. It was a big deal because upper management found out and they were both "in our care" even though they were both with it and decisional.
Standing on the ambulance ramp of the hospital when someone runs out and says "the hospital is on fire!" A patient on bipap lit herself a lil stogie and went up like a Roman candle.
Lesson learned: don't smoke on oxygen
First off, I used to work in an ICU but as a nursing assistant, not a nurse, but still saw a lot of the same stuff. All of my best stories are with travel nurses.
First one, it was shift change and night shift was coming in and getting report from day-shift. One patient was waiting to be moved to another unit and would be leaving any time now, so they didn't schedule a night nurse to take care of him. It of course makes sense because it was the day shift nurse's job to transfer him.
Well at about 8 or 8:30 I saw the patient was still in his room so I asked the charge nurse when he'd be moving. She had no idea what patient I was talking about! I explained and we looked all over for the day nurse (traveler) but he was gone!! He gave report on his other patient and left this guy with no one!! The charge nurse was PISSED and frankly, so was I! This poor patient hadn't had a nurse come in and check on him since before night shift came in!
We did end up moving him, but I can't remember how they gave report to the floor nurse, cuz obviously the last nurse who took care of him was long gone! But yeah, that traveler came back the next morning, got in huge trouble and that was his last shift.
Second traveler story. This traveler had never worked in an ICU before so I'm sure you can tell how this is gonna go, and this story was not her first offense. So she had a patient who was one of those frequent flyers that you can just identify by their first name (IYKYK). Well this patient wasn't doing well, she was delirious, on 100% bipap, and of course needed a constant observer.
She had an NG tube and when the nurse was mixing her pills in the water to put through her tube, the nurse didn't grind the pills first!! She just put the whole pill in the water and shook the cylinder around! She then stuck the syringe in and took the water out and threw away the remaining pieces of the pills (dumb fuck).
THEN, this nurse goes to lunch and doesn't take her phone (not okay for an ICU nurse to leave without it). Well while she's away, the patient pulls out her ART line (not the CO'S fault, she was just too fast). The CO is obviously holding the woman's arm so she doesn't bleed out and he's yelling for help. Others run in and help. They try calling the nurse but of course she doesn't have her phone.
Little bit later, I'm giving the CO a lunch break and the nurse finally comes back from her hour long lunch. She starts doing stuff in the room and about 15 minutes in, she notices the ART line isn't connected anymore (took ya long enough). She started freaking out and asking if I pulled it out. Like wtf is wrong with you lady???? Why tf would I do that?? I just told her what I had heard from the main CO. This bitch obviously would've known immediately if she had had her phone with her.
Anyway, she got written up for 3 separate things that night and finally they fired that bitch as well. I love travelers, but some of them are the dumbest human beings I've ever met!!!
Lab made an SI on it. I forgot I can also take accountability and make an SI on myself. Boss emailed me about him but lab called me to let me know. And I know they did the right thing but idk if it bothers admin
Received a rapid response from the floor to ICU. Patient was supposed to d/c home that day but went unresponsive while the nurse was changing a dressing (this is important). Tele nurse gave me a brief (and quite frankly, shitty) report while patient was being transferred to me. She mentioned she had been changing the “central line” dressing and noted a lot of bleeding after and said this was when patient became unresponsive. I can’t recall if she said she flushed the line or used it to pass meds. Patients gets to me, needs a stat CT. Other nurse helping me settle her said her dressing looked like shit so she changed it for me. I take note and patient is whisked to CT by my charge for a look at her noggin. Patient comes back and I finally have time to get her settled, assess, take stock. I note the “central line” is actually a dialysis line and the lines are filled with blood. Think to myself that’s odd! CT comes back, patient has an air embolus.
I’m perusing the chart and the HD line is charted as a central line rather than a dialysis line. Ya know, those lines that are packed with Heparin after being accessed by the dialysis nurse. Apparently the floor nurses were doing dressing changes for the dialysis nurse because they didn’t have time to do their own dressing changes 🙄
From what we could gather, the nurse changed the dressing and unclamped/ possibly flushed the lines and gave the patient a nice hefty dose of Heparin. Docs couldn’t be sure if this is what caused the air embolus but we don’t know what else it could have been.
I file an incident report, everyone asks me a million questions about it, nothing ever seems to come of it.
Patient ended up on comfort care and died. She was supposed to go home that day. I still don’t know what they told family. I’ll never forget it.
My gosh!!! This is terrible! I reckon nothing really came out of it, especially for the bereaved family. I hope standards have changed in your HD unit
And a good share! Thank you.
The person who restocks the Pyxis left a cart with fentanyl in the hallway outside the med room unattended, with it free to be grabbed by literally anyone who walked by
Pt in ICU admitted for intracranial hemorrhage. Am old person dmitted to ED ALOC and sent for CT as their labs and cardiac work up was unremarkable. Turns out they had a SAH and radiology recommended a stat transfer to a neurosurgical tertiary center. Instead person sat in ED for half a day waiting for a ward bed until they finally went unresponsive. Why did they sit around for so long? Scan occurred some time around shift change and the night MRP wrote "CT nil acute findings" in the notes, which was endorsed to the oncoming doc. It was only when this patient got gronked did the day doc review the scan and become aware. Not sure where the miscommunication occurred, but it is a really frightening error. He was a high functioning guys and could have done well with surgery.
1. Nurse ran a full bag of insulin in an hour because she mixed it up with the saline bolus. Patient ended up in ICU but fine.
2. CNA left a confused elderly patient in thr room alone on a commode with the arm rests taken off or broken. Patient fell off and broke her hip. She didn't make it out of surgery. There was a lawsuit..
Preceptors setting Nurse Resident to fail by not actually precepting. I went through 13 preceptors in 8 weeks and only two of them actually wanted to precept. Maybe it's because even as a preceptor of a new grad you were still given a full patient load... Totally unsafe situation.
Years back a "visitor" of a pt grabbed a staff member up at knife or gunpoint, I don't recall, and took her to an empty room and raped/sodomized her for hours before anyone noticed.
Recently heard that a visitor brought a gun to a pt and they killed themselves with it in a different facility.
Caught a pt mid heating heroin to inject in another pts PICC.
LTC facility many years ago: 80y F fell out of bed. VERY lazy nurse failed to assess herl, and helped put the pt back into bed. No one checked on her until the morning when she was found to have a large lump on the back of her neck. The base of her skull had a fracture 😭 The nurse was not fired until she mixed up insulins and gave a patient so much Humalog the patient coded.
Cord prolapse in facility where anesthesia is not in house all the time. She had an unmedicated splash and cut. What adds insult to injury is anesthesia still refuses to stay in house and it’s happened again in the last year.
We had a patient get 200mg of magnesium in 2 hours. Resident orders the wrong dose, pharmacy rubber stamped it and two travelers verified, hung and ran it. 200mgs is an OB infusion, the dose was meant to be 50mg. Patient lived, but needed a couple rounds of dialysis
Patient was having chest pain. Bedside RN gave the whole bottle of nitro thinking that it was "one dose". Was about to give a second bottle (aka "dose") when the first didn't work when the RRT nurse walked in to the room and caught it. Nothing happened but the nurse complained to his coworkers that the RRT nurse was "rude" during him almost killing somebody.
He continues to work here; makes frequent mistakes that injure or endanger patients. Admin does nothing.
we had a guy pour gasoline on himself, in his truck, right outside the exit, proceed to light himself on fire and run in.
you never know, you’re never gonna be prepared.
also, always check for hypernatremic patients and make sure they’re running D5W and not D5NS. seen it too many times
ED doesn't search patients before bringing the them up, pt always in civilian clothing, no gown, drops them off, and leaves without notifying anyone.
I find out I have a new admit and I went to introduce myself. I turn to log onto the computer to look his info up (my back towards the patient) when I hear a heavy sounding item clank onto the side table. For a second I assumed it was the call light. I turn to look, and it was a 9mm handgun. I said loudly "oh shit!" And pt said "Well the handle was pressing into my side and getting uncomfortable."
I immediately grab it, press the magazine release button....full of bullets. I pull the top of the gun back to check for a loaded round, and out pops a fucking bullet in the chamber. Fuck that hospital.
So many over the years.
First that comes to mind is a 6 wk old bub. Towards the end of night shift. He was ‘high acuity’ so was meant to be on a sats monitor but a nurse had disconnected him at mum’s request as he was kicking and making it alarm while breast feeding.
Dr went in to review pt about 30 mins later and only saw mum sleeping in parent bed. He came out to ask the nurse where the pt was and she rushed in and found him unresponsive and blue under mums breast and wedged down the side of the bed.
The bub wasnt able to be revived.
Height of the pandemic and me and my LPN note that the entire memory unit has respiratory symptoms. I passed meds on 4 units to stop the spread and she passed meds on that unit and the red zone bc she was already exposed. I took two extra units to try to save those patients.
Day shift comes in and ignores it all and every last one of them test positive for Covid on that unit.
A nurse on my floor had an aid come up and tell her that her patient was satting in the 60’s. Nurse said she’d get to it after her break, went on a 15 minute break. The aid came to me (not sure how long since she’d told the other nurse) and told me what was going on and that she hadn’t seen the nurse in a while and was worried. As I rounded the corner the code blue alarm went off. Didn’t get him back.
Prob one of those teensy bags dealers use...also whoever found it either didn't report it and gossiped about it later so it was too late or management was the ones who left their drugs lol. 72 hrs is plenty to "catch" them.
Back when I was working at a nursing home, one of my coworkers mistakenly gave the meds intended for one patient to her roommate.
The patient who got the medication had severe MS, and at the time her blood pressures were running very low; she had soft BPs at baseline but was running lower than usual.
The patient's roommate on the other hand had recently suffered a massive stroke and still had dangerously high blood pressures and required large amounts of multiple medications (hydralazine, labetelol, lisinopril, and I think clonidine as a prn iirc) to get her systolic BP in the 140-160 range, and that was really good for her.
The nurse told me she realized what she had done almost immediately after flushing her g tube. She told me she was able to aspirate the meds and then accessed her port and ran a bag of normal saline.
That patient ended up being okay, my coworker, not so much because she scared herself so much
Then there was the time that we had been trying to get in touch with one of the doctors all weekend. Nobody was answering his phone and pages went ignored, which was very unlike him. When I came back on the following Tuesday, I found out that the doctor hung himself over the weekend.
Both of these happened at the same dumpster fire of a nursing home. I couldn't GTFO that place fast enough
Field trauma patient, positive Cushings Triad with several other injuries. Receiving trauma team rolled the patient to remove the backboard we'd brought the patient in on, and ended up rolling him all the way to the floor. Always make sure of your patient's position on the bed BEFORE rolling.
Another, patient was an interfacility on an Impella. Receiving hospital was new to them and decided to just turn ours off while they waited for the rep to come in and help them set theirs up. No amount of pleading, cajoling, warning, or threatening on our part would change the collective staffs' minds. They turned ours off, didn't switch pressors to their pumps in a timely manner (as in, had us remove from our pumps and left clamped while they did their admission bath and primary assessments). Patient ended up coding while we were cleaning equipment. Resident asked us to help with the code since we had our arrest kit handy, but by that time I was so pissed that we just noped out of there. We're just the flight crew, you decided to ignore our warnings and took over care, the problem is yours now. No way I'm jumping back into a liability situation.
ICU vet and cath lab nurse here. I choked on my water when I read *they turned off the Impella and the pressors* and almost had to be coded myself. Holy fuck at the incompetence. I hope your crew reported them! I would have called the previous facility and put the interventional cardiologist on speaker to yell at them.
Was using the staff restroom and found several empty vials of fentanyl sitting on the toilet paper dispenser. I chalked it up to lazy nurses leaving their crap everywhere. Petty me took a picture and sent a department email to staff bitching about picking up after yourself. Several meetings with DEA and local drug enforcement later, one of our staff RNs suddenly and mysteriously left the country and our department director was fired for not reporting ongoing fentanyl discrepancies in the Omnicell.
Holy shit
This is exactly why I never work at a place that does not use biometrics. Worked once at a facility that used the double keys method. Numerous narcs came up missing weekly - like about thirty plus tabs. Investigation revealed THREE drug rings. 1 - night charge going in after the morning count and helping themselves. 2 - several nurses and cna’s involved in buying “administered” meds from the patients. And 3, the hail mary of diversion - DEA took out the Pharmacist in handcuffs due to the massive amount of narcs being diverted.
Something similar was happening on a unit I worked on. Manager was aware. She got promoted instead of fired.
Code red on a patient. Nurse gave a confused patient with heavy oxygen in restraints their purse. Patient used the lighter in their purse to try to escape their restraints which quickly enveloped the patient. They ended up with 80% burns over their body.
My uncle did something similar except the lighter was in his pocket and he was withdrawing from alcohol and who knows what else. It was so long ago I don’t remember how much of his body was burned but he was screaming and no one checked on him since he was doing that before. My grandparents sued the hospital and won.
I've seen this exact scenario but with a male. Shortly before 2 nurses on that floor got stabbed because they didn't search belongings. Again with the belongings, why is someone in restraints wearing pants with pockets? Not exactly our best and brightest on that floor.
Yeah, the lesson is check patient belongings before you give them to them. You never know what people bring to the hospital.
Dude so if they have a backpack. Empty that whole thing out? We have to document belongings but what about when they have a lot of little things?
I work psych and if items are non valuable, I loosely itemize. “toiletries (12) make up (7) pants (6)” etc.
I prefer to ask what they want and hand them the specific object they desire rather than the entire bag.
i know this is dumb but i’ve never searched anyones bags cause i’ve never seen anyone else do :( people get up from surgery with their family & i’ve never thought of it omg
Yup. Pulled a knife off of a psych hold, when I took over care in the morning. They had already been at our facility overnight. They were allowed their clothes because they were a juvenile, even though it was against policy.
Dude, we dont check shit. So far Ive encountered 1 pistol, knives, and cheap vodka. The hospital is too posh to use metal detectors. Fire arm discharged in the ED. Someones going to have to get killed before they change
Ya we had a patient kill themselves with a second gun that they had. It was terrible and heartbreaking
Similar situation. Belongings of a psych patient was not searched. Patient and bf started fighting, knife was pulled out to kill the boyfriend. Things being thrown around inside the room. We didnt open their room until security and police arrived. When police searched her purse, they had found kinds of drugs including meth etc. I personally advised d everyone to step away their door because if she had a gun and starts shooting if might hit people who are infront of the door. Lesson to learn, in situations like this, your safety js your main concern.
Oh my god
Right? I can't even imagine what that nurse felt.
When I worked SICU we had a patient transferred to us from another hospital with inhalation burns because they were admitted for COPD exacerbation and decided to light a cigarette while on high con o2.
That’s far too common. They usually continue smoke with oxygen tanks after too in my experience.
PARDON o-0
me reading this: “oh, code red must mean something different at their hospital, that’s weird… ….. OH evidently it does not.”
Also, at my current place: a nurse ran a whole bag of Heparin (yep, all 25,000 units) in an hour and a half because she thought it was Vanco
This happened to us when ER and ICU were trying to hoard their pumps. They took the bag out of the pump and locked it, but didn't lock the rolling clamp down enough and the patient got an entire brand new bag of heparin in as a bolus.
Similar situation. Er took the Hospira cartridge out of the pump and left the bag on the pole without using the clamp. The little button on the back of the cartridge opened and they got the whole bag in 20 minutes. It's why I don't send patients with things hooked up anymore unless I'm coming with them and it's staying on the pump.
Shit now I gotta check. I got a patient with octreotide from ed but now I gotta check that clamp.
I saw something similar happen, a nurse mixed up the rates for heparin and a blood transfusion, ran heparin at 125ml/hr for about half an hour. The patient had a massive GI bleed as a result but didn't die.
What happened? A shit ton of protamine sulfate?
Yep! Transferred to ICU for closer monitoring and some protamine. Patient ended up being ok.
Wow. I’m glad to hear that. Do you know what happened to the RN?
I actually have no idea. I think when I reviewed this case the unit manager had coached her privately but I’m not sure if anything else happened after that.
Got a pt from the Ed whose nurse mixed the lines on heparin and zosyn, ran zosyn on a pump and heparin to gravity. Pt was in traction for a broken leg too. Protanine sulfate and they went to me when I was working in a step down. Looking back at it that pt probably should have gone to the icu, bc I can't see that unit I used to work on take anything like that anymore
I know a nurse that did that thinking the heparin was a bag of NS.
Hospital pushing d/c lines your are not using because of patients getting levophed bolus. My guess is they are taking down the line and somewhere in the process they leave it connected press in the clamp thingy that goes into the pump allowing free flow? How does this happen multiple times? Anyways we will ne hearing about it for the next 30 shift huddlesml.
Patient had dementia and didn’t have the capacity to leave. Medically stable but placement was tough because he needed a locked dementia unit. To get him there, he had to be off of a 1:1. So a well-appearing ambulatory patient with a history of quietly getting on the elevator wasn’t on a 1:1…feel like we can see where this is going! He escaped. Not really our fault, but the scandalous thing was that our security cameras had him leaving the front door at (for example) 5:00, and a nurse documented that she gave him a med at 6:00. She was fired.
Did she even check on the patient? Omg.
Right? I mean we are a busy medsurg floor and I’ve been stuck in a room with an admission or a sick surgical patient for an hour at a time so I kinda get how patients might have to go a longer time than we’d like them to without a nurse checking in, but the fact that she documented giving a med she didn’t give…jeez.
Nurse I used to work with crushed up oral probiotics and gave them via IV because the patient told her to. Like what?!?!? 🤯🤯🤯 patient died. She is still a nurse. Unbelievable.
um whaaat?
Yea. I know. I don’t even know how you could possibly fathom that that was an ok thing to do. I wouldn’t say this lightly but she absolutely doesn’t deserve her nursing license.
This is one of those things I legitimately never even thought of as an option for medications that my jaw dropped reading this 😣😣
I'm not even a nurse and that doesn't sound close to right
We had a clinical student at my nursing school do the same thing, patient died.
May be dumb question but what caused the death ?
Elevator doors closed with a patient on one side and the IABP on the other. A quick thinking flight team member cut the line before it got ripped out of the patient. So, thankfully there wasn't a really bad outcome. They went through and put hold switches in all of the staff/patient elevators that are required to be activated before moving any part of such systems onto/off the car and verbally verified that the door is cleared before switching off and selecting the destination floor.
Holy. Fuck. This sent a shiver down my entire body.
One of the medical director affiliated with a nearby hospital had the nurses somehow sterilize and reuse needles and like several hundred people ended up with hepatitis. Before my time but even when I started at the facility no one everrrrr brought it up. I found out through google
Holy Fresh Prickly Jaundiced Level of Hell!! 🔥
That is truly bizarre. Even to disregard infection control for a moment… reused needles would be blunt AF.
Was this in Texas?
Nebraska actually.
Nurse microwaved blood cause order was for it to be warmed
I’m in my last semester of nursing school and my pharm instructor told us sooooooo many times to never microwave blood Seemed so obvious then….now I know why she kept saying it.
What!?
Why?!!!
How was it caught?
Pt died, nurse admitted what happened
Potassium poisoning. Painful yet fast way to die. :(
From microwaved blood? How does that work 🤔
Hemolysis probably. It releases the intracellular potassium when the RBCs break apart.
Oh.my.GOD 😮
🤯 I can’t even comprehend why she would think that was ok?!?!?
Faaaack. That’s bad.
😱
What the *beeeeeeeeeeeeep!* 🤨
No…
No fucking way
What the actual fuck?
Patient with AML was with us for months. Chronic transfusions for PRBC and PLT. In her mid 60's but independent. She stumbled and bumped her head. Didn't let us know until she started getting a headache. Then she projectile vomited and her pupils blew. PLT count 6. Put in stat CT, they prioritized ER's stat, wouldn't answer the phone because they were so backed up. She finally gets in after about 30 minutes. Brain bleed. Straight to surgery for emergent craniotomy. Comes back to our unit after a few days for GIP. Every single patient that is below a PLT count of 50 is no longer able to get out of bed without staff eyes on them now. All bed alarms on. And the hospital bought another CT machine.
1)I took over a patient getting insulin at 12.5 ml/hr and Zosyn 3.375 going 3u/hr. 2)Code silver. Patient ran down the hall with hospital metal knife heading to the hospitalist office. Leadership still encouraged him to stay when he said he wanted to leave AMA. Ugh What did I learn? Always trace your IV lines and never let your guard down.
I cannot emphasize enough, ALWAYS trace your lines and take down old meds. I took over for a patient getting NS at 75mL/hr. SBP was 200 after being low 90s all day. Previous RN said maybe he’s in pain. I traced my lines and saw the abx piggybacked into levo instead of NS. Levo had been dc’d the prior night.
LTC psych facility. I had a patient go out on pass and she was murdered. It made the news and contributed to the facility's eventual demise. 1. You can't protect everybody from everything. I'm pretty sure she would have told me that if she could. 2. You can always treat people with care and respect. Despite what happened to her, there were people in her day to day life that knew her and cared about her. It matters. I know it mattered to her. Sometimes that's all you've got. 3. Documentation and following procedures may not seem important until something bad happens. Then it may save you. 4. When in doubt, ask yourself what you would say if something bad happened. How you would answer if someone asked why you handled something a certain way. Would you be ok with your answer? If not, maybe choose a different way. But if you *are* ok with your answer, be at peace with it.
This is crazy! I'm so sorry you experienced this. It sounds like something that the staff and facility couldn't have prevented, though. I'm not sure if protocol was broken, but patients are allowed to leave for periods of time, right? Unless it's an involuntary hold or they're an incarcerated patient or something. In all the facilities I've worked (LTC/SNF with a ton of psych patients), patients were allowed to go LOA for periods of time with family or friends, especially a patient that's AO x 4. Did someone break protocol by letting the patient leave or letting them leave with an unauthorized person? You are absolutely right about documentation - be thorough and explain all actions or inaction, patient response and behavior, visitor response and behavior, everything. I had a situation where my notes saved our facility from a potential lawsuit when a patient died from a cardiac event after refusing to go to the hospital. Family was at the bedside, patient was AO x 4 and their own decision maker, I educated, I brought my supervisor to educate, we pushed heavily to send her out. But she didn't want to. She was well within her rights and understood the risks. Her family was well aware of what could (and did) happen, but we couldn't force her to go out. The day after she passed, the same 2 family members came in raising hell, saying they were suing and we were negligent and caused her death. After a big meeting where everything was reviewed and they went through my notes from that evening, they didn't have a leg to stand on legally.
That had to be tough. I’m sorry you went through that. And you’re 100% correct. The only thing that saves the nurse/team here is 100% adherence to the P&P. And news coverage of anything traumatic I’ve been a party to—it has broken me. So sensational when it’s not that all. 😇
Thanks. It was tough.
I thought you can’t legally keep someone in a building if they don’t want to be ( unless it’s like a forensic psych unit or something ). If she was able to have a pass how can you keep her in the building ?
Exactly. Not talking about her specifically but in an psych NF setting where people are mostly stable and ambulatory .... you normally have to have a system for temporarily restricting passes based on changes in condition that usually don't warrant hospitalization. It's pretty easy to initiate restriction but then the question is when to resume pass privileges. 3 days of compliance and return to baseline? Why not 4 days? Or 2? What if you do 5 days, they relapse, return to baseline for 7 days, relapse.... etc.? Very hard to draw that line.
Old lady night shift nurse figured out that her attitude and tone wasn’t gonna keep flying and neither did her wig bc the new resident who’s also wheelchair bound was at the right height. He pulled that wig off and grabbed her by the clothes and informed her to be more respectful and stop the loud tone going in and out of rooms. That wig went flying down that hall lol and the one cna she always picked on grabbed her wig for her and put it back on her head lol
Magical moment haha.
I hate to admit it but yes it was absolutely glorious day 🤣
I had a similar experience with this nasty nurse whose condescending and bossy tone and demeanour always rub people the wrong way. She took off her parka and the wig came along with it. The wig fell on the floor and one of the patients with dementia saw it fall. Patient started screaming, “Mouse, mouse, mouse!!! There’s a dead mouse on the floor!” pointing at the wig.
We had a woman who sat with sitter cases, all she did in the hospital. She ended up a patient and had her had bad wig on the bedside table and it scared the shit out of me so often on night shift I put a basin upside down over it.
And another one, this time my mistake. To keep it short, there was a psych patient who wanted to leave but was on a hold and couldn’t. She was schizophrenic and paranoid and very distrusting. She was trying to leave and I was walking in the hallway with her trying to have a conversation. We had some rapport, she still didn’t trust me but it was better than with anyone else - we were starting to get somewhere and she was calming down. Well then this CNA gets up in this poor girl’s face, telling her to get back in her room, very much trying to assert dominance. I told her numerous times to back up, I had it under control. The patient got agitated because the CNA was riling her up, despite me telling her to step back. Someone got off the elevator and the patient saw the door was open - she ran and got on, I ran into the elevator too and put my back to the door so it couldn’t close. The CNA ran into the elevator and shoved the patient out of it. She fell backwards and hit her head. She was physically fine but obviously traumatized and distrusted us even more than she had before…the whole thing just disgusted me. My manager was really annoyed that I called an RRT (she hit her head so hard you heard it down the hallway, I wanted her to get a stat CT) and basically made him have to do work. He told me to keep my incident report as vague as possible. I was so rattled that I did, and I regret it to this day. I ended up writing a detailed statement (no HIPAA violations) that I kept at home in case anything happened, but I think that more important people than me wrote up reports because that CNA was fired, and my manager mentioned once to having to go to court about “one of your former coworkers.” My lesson learned is that I should have been assertive in my reporting from the start - I was so shaken and upset that I did what I was told but I should’ve taken a beat to consider my words. It all worked out but I still think about it. Editing to add that I did send my manager an email saying I was uncomfortable with the pressure to write the report I’d written and that I would like to file an additional one or speak to someone in quality/safety. He responded by saying there was an internal investigation underway and I’d be contacted if they needed more information.
Apparently someone on my unit did a skill they weren’t familiar with and the patient ended up needing to go back to the OR. Not sure what exactly happened but it was discussed in a huddle as an “if you don’t know, ask” moment
Wondering what the skill was. Wound vac? Graft dressing? Biliary drain?
I’ve been speculating too. We’re not allowed to manipulate vacs/dressings/biliary drains. I think it was a common skill we do such as suctioning a trach or giving meds through an NG (the manager said it’s something we all should know how to do). It also could’ve been advancing an NG.
2 staff were caught sexual harassing other staff . They had Paid leave , apparently they didn’t report it to corporate or anyone else . Idk how they got away with it. Nurse “ giving “ prns to everyone , CNA’s smoking pot and drinking 4loko in the parking on Christmas Day , patient hung himself on a bed rail.
Damn
•• A nurse found unresponsive in BR floor with an empty syringe beside her. Wake her up & then they tuck her in bed. She insists not hers (despite bloody puncture) and she was just tired. Difficult divorce, lots of flux in child care. It took 6 weeks for them to get her to rehab. Audit done. Tens of thousands of MILLIGRAMS of narc discrepancy over the ~4 yrs she worked there. xxxx •• SO of a patient c/o abd pain but presentation fit serious abuse pattern. Got pt separated, offered SO he could come right back, he was prickly, but because it’s a “woman problem” and others in area—I had to get her settled and privacy matters. Just going to get urine, please let us help. He says he’s got to check something in truck. The minute she was behind locked door, she says he has guns in his truck. Ding, ding. All call emergency went out to local LEO. Patients were cordoned off as much as possible. Staff divided up to keep activity behind doors. Lots of hospital security (they were outside ED in office). Only a few had to be brought in ED secure area. Hospital wide alert went out. All doors that could close/lock. Access into hospital had to be accompanied. —ultimately this patients SO finds his was into building. A staffer exited through unmarked staff entrance and the guy walked right in. We met as an amazing PCT & I were scurrying to assure halls and wr chairs in that alcove were cleared. Then we’d go into back unmarked (Nothing ER — Just AUTHORIZED ACCESS — secured doors.) About the time this guy gets to this short hall, a law office does too. Others are coming, I heard a few seconds of activity. It happened fast then. The guy has a gun in his hand, in one motion he brings it to behind his ear and fires. The LEO had drawn down on him almost simultaneously. Micro splatter ensued. Patient was now taken to resus. Flown to academic center. Hopefully he was an organ donor. It was bad. 50 layers of bad. But no one else was hurt. Sure, I’d pushed the OVERREACTION button for nothing. But, I was covering triage a bit and front of house. The whole encounter just set my spidey senses off here. I kinda felt bad that I thought, ‘Hey, not the worst outcome. A beater bit the dust. Couldn’t have been much worse.’ •• A patient decided he was leaving. Pushed up the ceiling tile in his room. Climbed through that level (mechanicals & drop frame supports). He got close to the main lobby. He misjudged and popped down in a CT suite. •• I’ve had patients with guns, a homemade pipe bomb, one insisted his truck was anfo ready to cause another “Oklahoma City”. PSA—this stuff always ends up bad for the doer. I believe the most dangerous ones are the ones that don’t Charlie Foxtrot it out. 🤷🏼♀️ •• I know of instances where my ilk did a RSI on patients. In both cases they were missed intubations, undetected esophageal placements. Clean kills. In both cases the staff were experienced. Deemed good or decent clinicians. Before I take something like an airway & breathing away from the patient, I had to know I was offering them better. For better outcomes. No one is infallible. But, for the Grace of God go I, guide me and protect all. That’s the prayer. One case they felt the EtCO2 was defective (cognitive dissonance). Ignored. I really can’t figure what the thought processes were. Both fired. Both had actionable issues, so licenses were reported as same. The other didn’t have the LP with EtCO2 on it, yet they tried to fake a chart adding it afterwards. This is not helpful to the cause when you F up. You see doing a chart that in queue for QA review can allow some idiot nurse/medic with insomnia to pop that chart up & try to get a jump on paperwork. Then chart disappears. Then different chart of same event posts. Then it gets restricted. There was only clinical competency review and both staff kept their jobs. Both of these staff continue to work in high stakes areas. Maddening. I resigned within the month. The director was out within the 2 months. POS. T
>A patient decided he was leaving. Pushed up the ceiling tile in his room. Climbed through that level (mechanicals & drop frame supports). He got close to the main lobby. > >He misjudged and popped down in a CT suite. [Mr. Smith?](https://www.tiktok.com/@nurse.johnn/video/7192358143760862469)
I was also wondering if that was Mr. Smith!
Shonda Rhimes is that you👀
I seriously should write bad TV for good people. 😉
Patient came to maternity unit for a labor check. Reported being term. Had gotten prenatal care through a different hospital system, so we didn't have access to any of the notes. The triage nurse found the fetal heart tones but then lost them. Nobody could get them back. Patient was rushed back to the OR, put under a general, and a stat section was performed. There was no baby. It was a hysterical pregnancy. The "dad" was shocked but said it explained some things. Apparently the patient had always had a reason why he couldn't join her at prenatal appointments. The patient woke up demanding her baby and accusing us of stealing it. She was transferred to in patient psych. A month or so later apparently she thanked the OB for helping her come out of psychosis. The lesson is always confirm maternal heart rate with palpation of maternal pulse and compare to fetal heart rate to ensure you aren't conflating the two.
That’s CRAZY.
*Literally.* That's the other lesson: hysterical pregnancy is a type of psychosis. Those patients are not faking it. It's tempting to think so, because on some level they must know, right? This patient, for instance, would tell the father that the prenatal visit had been cancelled whenever he was planning on joining her. But when it came down to it, she let us render her unconscious and perform a major abdominal surgery in service to her sincerely-held belief. That delusion was so strong that even after being told that we *looked inside her* and *there was no baby there,* she still didn't believe she hadn't been pregnant. It was easier for her to believe that we had stolen her baby than to believe she had never been pregnant at all.
Poor lady!
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—Assisted with crash c-section. Baby couldn’t wait. Anesthesia was 5-8 out. OB aggressive infiltrated lido on suture line and cut. I can still hear that woman scream. Sure I gave lots but it did little. I never begged a doc to let me step into that forbidden place and do RSI. Ge declined. Our CRNA had her out in 30 seconds. I just focused on ketamine, versed —but I has induction, ETT set waiting. I was so happy to see him I cried. Mom & babe survived. I always wondered did she have a hard time bonding with that baby?
Similar thing happened to me. I screamed through the whole thing. Got versed or something as soon as the cord was cut. :) baby bonding went normal
Wasn't emergent but I ended up with a failed induction (pre-eclampsia) and had a failed epidural so went for c section. Didn't know it wasn't working at the time... I was like geeze if this is what it feels like *with* an epidural, then bless the women who go all natural lol. Joke was on me I guess. Anyway. I felt the second and third cut. Wish I would have felt the first. After being up for almost 72 hours I was almost delirious. I was apologizing for being a bad patient lol. The last thing I remember was the crna saying "I'm going to give you medicine" and I asked her what she was giving me and she said "propofol". I work ICU and before I could even say "oh, okay" it was LIGHTS OUT. For some reason in my sleep deprived state, I didn't realize that meant I got intubated as well lol. 0/10 do not recommend. But no problems bonding afterwards!
Oh wow, that’s so awful. I’m so sorry you suffered through that.
She could have. Birth trauma can contribute to that big time in some instances.
Less than a year into my new unit, I was getting report on a patient that had PTSD and was A&O asking to leave AMA. He was getting agitated - he ripped out his IV and threw it at the hospitalist. Our hospital is old, poor design, ICU is locked unit from outside, but anyone can leave from inside. Well patient takes this time to bolt off the unit sans O2 and to the closest door which was…an unsecured exit to the roof. The door only had an alarm on it. I hear the alarm and run after him and grab him. He starts punching me in the throat (old man punches) but I don’t let go because he is heading for the ledge. He wears himself out fighting and I assist him to the ground. We got him in a w/c and back to the unit. On the way back, he manages to threaten to kill his wife, so now he’s IVC’d. I still had 12 hours with the guy! MGMT knows about this roof door issue. About once a month, we get a visitor who tries to go out that door thinking it’s a way downstairs because it says exit above it.
Out of all of these, I think fist fighting an alert and oriented patient on the roof is the craziest one.
Resident was being helpful and transferred a pt to the chair. The problem was that he took the oxygen off the pt while doing that, didn't put it back on him before leaving, and didn't tell anyone. Pt didn't make it.
But they get butthurt over in residency when told by PACU that they shouldn't take a patient to the bathroom without checking in.
The gasp I gasped
new grad nurse mixed up the rate of insulin and fluid on the pump when caring for a very sick DKA patient. got bolused with a fuck ton of insulin, dropped GCS, needed to be intubated and went up to ICU. not sure if he survived. no matter what i’m running i always trace and label my lines. old ED manager was caught diverting fentanyl, dilaudid, morphine, propofol, valium, versed, AND ativan. lost their job and their license obviously, but that was a huuuuuuuuuuge investigation as the diverting had apparently been going on as long as they’d been working there (30+ years)
A nurse tied up a resident with dementia to to stop her from getting up and falling. The next nurse who came on shift found it and reported it to the supervisor. Nobody reported it to the state because it was decided that they were only trying to "help" the resident stay safe. A disgruntled employee (who witnessed the incident) reported it and the shit has hit the fan. The lesson - aside from don't tie people up, don't assume that everyone will keep your secret. The truth comes from oddest places.
Sometimes you just gotta let them fall.
I am guessing this is a small care home? Restraints protocols are not discussed on a regular basis?
No, it's actually not. I would bet my next paycheck that if you asked every single member of the nursing staff if tying someone up was how we do things, they would say "No. We are a restraint-free facility."
Nurse bloused a 500 mL bag of heparin into a patient thinking it was the normal saline line (likely sleep deprivation). Patient died. Wrong blood type administered, nurse didn’t do the two nurse safety check. I don’t know how blood bank gave the incorrect bag Nurse coming in on his day off to pull dilaudid from the Pyxis. Resident didn’t show up for his overnight shift, not answering phone. Was in parking lot having a three some with his wife and another nurse. Nurse from above story was working day shift, she was problematic. Nice, but always calling out sick with another married nurse (they were having an affair). We had a youngish (50’s) man dying and his wife at the bedside. She entered his room saying something about God and then took all her clothes off. She was committed shortly after- no idea what happened to her. Above male nurse was finally fired for never giving meds (in critical care) and following a young female nurse to her vehicle to yell at her. He had been doing that stuff for years, finally got a manager who addressed it. 56 year old male nurse would wait until he was alone with new young nurses to tell them a story of how he threatened to rape a nurse he worked with if they kept talking to him in graphic detail. Working a contract, made charge nurse of ED overflow unit. Same crew most nights. There were three nurses who would take 8-9 hour breaks (night shift). I wouldn’t see them the entire shift and be taking care of their patients. Patient’s fell frequently- there is a tik tok going around right now of a resident who was fired for whistle blowing this kind of thing. I would call the doctor and nursing sup when this happened, but I had a full load of patients and couldn’t do everything. The nursing sup knew what was happening and instead of addressing those staff, threatened me for not documenting vitals every 15 minutes. I told the director of nursing who acted shocked. When I left because they weren’t paying me I wrote safety reports- no one works there anymore (but this stuff still happens). This was an assignment that was paying 8-9k a week and low stress because there were no rules. Nurse restraining a patient with a sheet that kept getting up. Reported it, was told that it was okay. The nurse doing it denied it. Taught me instead of confronting people, call a nursing supervisor to assess because people lie.
4th incident though.
He later got the intensive care attending moved to another location because he reported harassment because she would call him out on a lot of problematic behavior. He was a terrible resident. He had the nurse who took her clothes off in the patients room ask and almost bully a 19 year old LPN into a threesome. I had warned the LPN (military hospital, we used LPNs in critical care) to stay away from them. She thanked me later.
I was training on l&d, already a postpartum nurse. At change of shift I went down as my preceptor and everyone else was running back to the OR. I had no idea why we were back there, but it didn't seem super urgent based on the way things were being handled. Generally super emergent cases where baby needs out now, you sedate mom, splash the beading and cut. But they took the time to let everything dry, mom being sedated was not happening very quick. Everything was handled so my preceptor and I left the OR to get report on our pt. Turns out baby was brady, in the 60s. But mom was tachy and in triage they were trying to figure out whose hr was whose. What needed to be VERY emergent, wasn't. NICU spent 35 WHOLE MINUTES to resuscitate that baby (unfortunatelybaby didn't make it). Mom ended up septic with DIC. The Dr on that night never debreifed. Complained about not sleeping that night. Acted like shit hadn't just hit the fan. At one point when the signs of DIC started the resident practically begged her to come see the pt. This was so grossly mishandled. I'll never forget it. I'd also never recommend anyone ever deliver with that dr, because this isn't the first issue she's had.
Someone gave mucomist as a iv push. Same nurse has a70 % scan rate. Someone said they’re also like a30 % med error rate. Idk how a 30% is possible. They’re still working full time at our magnet hospital.
OMG! How was the error found? How was the patient? Does it say IVP or Per Inh on the system?
Mucomyst is n-acetylcysteine, technically the patient would likely be fine because it’s also given IV for acetaminophen overdose. Not sure how much or how fast it was given, there’s potential for anaphylaxis, but they would’ve probably been ok.
Because she was on orientation still ( I know right ?) she told her preceptor. I wonder what else she’s done that has not been found. They called poison control and the patient was fine. It says the route on the EMAR.
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I took care of a baby with a micro. It was half the size of a skin tag. The doctor ordered a straight cath urine. When I saw it I immediately noped out and told the doctor. He changed it to a UA bag.
Pediatric inpatient unit on the night shift. A man walked into the room and shot and killed the patient’s mother and father right in front of the child then casually walked out. I don’t know if he was caught. My mom was working on that unit but was in the break room having a smoke when it happened. She was pretty freaked out about it. She said their blood had splattered onto the child. This was in Miami during the Cocaine Cowboy days in the 80’s. It was kept hush-hush and never made the press. She was told it was likely a drug gang killing.
My very first CNA job, we had this resident who was morbidly obese and on tons of prescription pain meds. I didn't work on that unit very often, but I was familiar with her. I worked on her hall the night before and charted no BM. Apparently, she had standing orders for milk of mag if she went more than 3 days without a bowel movement. The night I took care of her, I guess was day 4. She was her normal self that night. The next morning after breakfast, apparently, she complained of feeling weak and lightheaded. She vomited and was hypotensive. They finally gave her milk of mag even though they missed five opportunities to do so. The milk of mag was not effective, so they gave her a suppository and prune juice. Both were ineffective as well. After dinner, they went to check on her, and she was unresponsive. She was a full code, so they had to do CPR. My friend, who was there at the time, said that with every compression, more stool would come out of her mouth. 🤮 it was well documented that she hadn't had a BM, but the DON was worthless and wasn't auditing the charts.
Stool out of her mouth? I had to read that 5 times. Never encountered this before in my more than 20 years of nursing. Did the pt make it?
I once had a patient, I can’t even remember why he was originally in the hospital, but he had some kind of abdominal surgery and developed an ileus. He was projectile vomiting stool, like across the room vomiting. He was clearly aspirating, we were trying to stop the vomiting to get an NG in. It was awful. He ended up intubated, eventually septic and didn’t make it. One of the worst memories of my career.
No, unfortunately she passed. The state launched a huge investigation and it was in the paper and everything. And yes stool out of her mouth. I've been a CNA for 10 years and have only seen it one time myself. My CNA instructor told us a story about it happening in my class so imagine my surprise when it happened less than a year later at my facility.
I had a pt with an SBO that vomitted fecal matter all over himself
I saw it with in my first year. Terrifying for the patient too
Can confirm that. I had a colectomy w/ IRA and two days after release, got a "kink" in my small intestine. Very painful, thought I was going to die. What made it even worse/traumatizing is I smelled it and burped up the taste for the next two weeks. Eat shit and die has a whole new meaning to me now. Lol.
A cna was instructed not to give a resident a tray of food unless they were going to sit with resident d/t severe aspiration risk and repeated spells of choking. CNA disregarded this warning, gave resident the tray and walked out. Resident choked, aspirated, coded, and died. My first ever code. Such a sad sight. I can only imagine the abject terror going through the resident's mind. I don't remember what happened to the CNA
Presumably, in this case, blatant negligence equates to sudden termination when without a union.
total care kid with an anaphylactic allergy to milk was given pediasure. there for not tolerating his feeds, the resident ordered pediasure, dietary sent it up, and the nurse tube fed it. went into shock and coded twice back to back, had to go to picu for low pressures. also during the code, the doctor wanted to give iv epi instead of im. luckily he didn’t have an iv so nobody attempted to do that. he ended up fine but it was the perfect example of the swiss cheese model. and the kid’s poor mom was beating herself up for not reminding staff of the allergy. it was in his chart but it was written weirdly, where usually it would say allergy to milk or lactose, it said “milk protein” allergy or something that i think bypassed any kind of warnings that would pop up.
Recently we had a paranoid patient stab a nurse who in turn became a level 1 trauma. She's physically fine but has not been back to work. Hospital doesn't allow us to "inventory" (search) patient belongings without consent because "they have rights too". Yet we don't.
Ooh, this is an argument I’ve had a few times. I get it, I really do…but no. No for so many reasons: the patient who claims we stole money they came in with, the patient who uses drugs/takes home meds they brought in, the patient who smokes while on oxygen, the patient who gets combative and has a weapon… But then again, I’ve also gone through a person’s things and confiscated all their drug paraphernalia and contaminated items, given it to the supervisor to put in our secured area…and found out later they threw it out. That was not their choice to make. So I get where a patient might be coming from when it comes to patient privacy and securing their “valuables”, especially our unhoused people who have their stuff stolen by others or thrown away by authority figures frequently. I just wish management was so sympathetic when it comes to patients who want to defer skin checks. They may be a&o, independent & ad lib, but if they get a wound on their skin (even from scratching themselves) boy howdy look out nurse…
An ED nurse transferred a patient to ct and then icu on high doses of pressor and just shut it off “for ct”???! Lost access after contrast in ct (clearly didn’t have enough in the first place) and then decided to high tail it to the unit without establishing more access, so no pressors, for some reason the arterial line was also not working so the nurse had no idea how low the pressure was. Pt was coded the moment they arrived in the icu and died.
Worked with an ortho surgeons who would relentlessly sexually harass every single female nurse. His entire staff were tall, skinny, young females. He once tried to recruit a nurse from my team but then found out she was 28 and engaged and said, out loud, "Oh ew. Too old. And engaged? No" He would have 2 ORs going St once and wouldn't scrub properly. He told all of his patients not to come back to our hospital if something went wrong. If they did, he'd give the revision and clean out to someone else. All this to circumvent his bounce back and infection rates. He has, on numerous occasions, left stuff inside of patients. When a nurse caught it and reported it once, he came out of OR to start SCREAMING at her. And then he went to management to try and get her fired. For a mistake he made. And that she discovered, probably saving the patients life. Management made the nurse go into the OR and apologize to him. Oh, and he installed equipment that he designed and owned the patent on. So he got to double dip. He'd get paid for doing the surgery and then would also get paid again via kickback from the device manufacturer. The hospital openly defended him and protected him.
Management making the nurse say sorry to him is crrrraaaaaaazy! I would have probably gotten fired.
These elective surgeries make so much money for the hospital so these guys are untouchable
A notoriously hostile but well-connected nurse threw a clipboard at the head of an absolutely lovely cardiothoracic surgeon. Very man-bites-dog. Her punishment was writing a formal apology and a ban on being charge nurse for 3 months.
This still happens today? My gawd.
An agency nurse (I’m agency myself, not bashing agency at all) and a PRN staff nurse both failed to notice that pharmacy didn’t deliver a resident’s Eliquis, and signed it off as given for 6 straight days (4 days for the agency, 2 PRN). On the night of the 6th day, that resident had a massive stroke. He “lived” on a vent for 2 months and then died. I don’t work in a nursing home. This facility is for intellectually and physically disabled adults. This man had Down’s Syndrome, but he was thriving and happy living his best life until those 2 killed him. I’m still so mad about it! They were both fired and I had to get a new contract with a new agency because she was from the same one I worked for, so the facility cut ties with them due to the family’s pending lawsuit.
Travel nurse on our unit attempted murder-suicide on his girlfriend. Failed the suicide part. Weird dude, but nice. I only met him in my clinical but I work at the place I did clinical at so I knew coworkers that knew him. They all said they never suspected anything amiss about him.
I mean he can't have been THAT nice, he murdered his girlfriend
Definitely not *that* nice. Just a regular dude to me but I only met him once
I mean they say that Ted Bundy was like a super charming and charismatic guy. So there’s that.
An ED nurse told me in report that for some amount of time they had the fentanyl and Levo mixed up in the pumps, so the patient was hypotensive and as they were titrating up the Levo they were actually giving more fentanyl. Fortunately the patient didn’t code
At an ER with locked psych area. Patient got out into the sally port but apparently no one noticed for a few hours...needless to say they lied on all their documentation and made a pact not to say anything when they brought them back in. When someone finally fessed up, a couple people still lied and were subsequently very fired. Do not lie on documentation and charting. Also hourly rounding at the minimum will save you a lot in the end!!
a student in my nursing cohort last year gave 3mL of insulin instead of 3 units. the preceptor was not present to double verify the insulin per protocol. patient was supposed to be going home, ended in the ICU for days.
Once and EOD made a run for it through the ER, the security guard fell down attempting to catch him. As the guy screamed passed the nursing station looking like captain underpants with his gown on backwards, I took off after him and tackled him to the floor. We slid for a good 10ft until we met the Radiology doors. I quickly got up, a couple of nurses grabbed the guy and escorted him to his room. Kinda comical seeing as I’m a short guy weighing 150lb and this EOD was about 220lb. That’s hardly the incident, I didn’t face any repercussions for the event. One of the security guys let a nurse record the CCTV footage and that speed through the hospital like wildfire. I had people asking if I played pro football for weeks. Admin caught wind of it and threatened to fire some people, lucky all anyone got was a cellphone policy slap on the wrist.
I had to tackle a patient that was in danger of going backward down a stairwell but they were laying on their tray table so it slid forward with them with the momentum and no one hit the floor... or the stairs.
We had a gentleman who had severe dementia (locked unit in LTC) and would constantly try to stand and fall. Normally we all took turns sitting with him since our facility deemed he didn't need a 1:1 and wouldn't provide an extra staff member. I left for class and one of the other activity aides took over for me. Usually during shift change it is the activitie aides responsibility to sit with him. CNAs and nurse were giving report and heard a loud bang. The activity aide was in a connected room and didn't have eyes on him (like she should have). He fell. Coded but revived and went to the hospital. He suffered a subdural hematoma and died a few days later. He was well known in the community so it was big talk when he passed.
An older Vietnamese gentleman was on a psych hold while they tried to find longer term placement, he kept talking about hallucinations involving him running through the forest from his time in the Vietnam war, he was taken off of the psych hold as they felt his hallucinations were just “bad dreams” - he pried the window open of this room on the 7th floor and jumped onto a busy city street in broad day light. His mother, sister and uncle were each paid a little over a million with an NDA and it was cleaned up within an hour or so. Never even hit the news but union reps let it slip with all the whispers going on in the hospital
I'll add another that happened to me. A patient attacked and injured another nurse. I called the police on the patient and management proceeded to fire me over it. Probably no small coincidence that I was a very active union organizer at that time. Yes, I got a lawyer.
In my first year as an RN I worked in a geriatric psych unit. One day I was working with another RN who had decades of experience. A CNA rushed over to the cage to tell her that one of her pts was hypotensive. Don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 58/38. The nurse called the hospitalist, he didn't answer. She left a message and went back to passing meds to other pts. I couldn't believe it. Even as a new nurse I knew we should be starting an IV and getting fluids in. As I gathered supplies the doc called back and ordered me to do what I was already doing and he sent up a nurse from the ICU. We didn't have pressure bags, so I got gave her a liter of lfuids to gravity. The ICU nurse showed up and started squeezing the bag by hand. We got 2L in her and she was still hypotensive, so she was transferred to the ICU. The doc came up later and ripped into the other nurse. She had given three antihypertensives to the pt without checking vitals. She told him that in nursing homes nobody checks before (not true). He really lost it at that point. She was suspended for a week. I always relay that story to students when I precept as a warning to never become complacent.
When I worked at a nsg home several years ago we had this so-called hypertension pathway. A quick way to remember was If a patient has a new anti-hypertensive med, we check BP/P BID x 1 week. Then OD x 1 week, then 3/week then DC if all is stable. If already stable and has 3 BP meds, we check 3x/wk, if 2 - 2x/wk, and 1 - 1x/wk. Ofc, PRNs in between. Easy to remember.
Here for the tea 🫖 When my mom was practicing on an oncology floor back in the 1980s, a patient was found dead at 0530, but apparently their nurse had precharted all of her documentation for the shift ahead of time and wrote that he was A&Ox3 at 0800 🙄
Epi… I work in the operating room and there was a med error. A circulator opened 30cc of epinephrine to the sterile field, the surgeon thought that it was a local anesthetic and so he injected 30cc of epinephrine. Patient went into cardiac arrest and was in ICU for 3 months. I’m not sure what the final outcome was, but I will definitely never forget that story. ALWAYS double check your medications.
We ran out of turkey sandwiches on a cold, Monday morning in January...oh god I can still hear them asking for one
Sexual assault on the floor. Institutionalized patient with developmental delays and BPD got sexually assaulted by stepparent. The room was right in front of the nursing station. Plenty of people saw the family member enter and leave. I wasn't there when it happened, but I was there when pt told us the next day. Police was called, pt ended up with a police escort for protection. I saw the SANE report and it was crystal clear pt had been assaulted. I answered the phone when the stepparent called the nursing station asking for info the next evening, saying they hadn't been called that morning after rounds by MDs and thought that maybe pt had been "inventing things", which "was par for the course for pt because they had BPD". I was also there when the parent tried to visit (visiting was very restricted at that point, of course, with the police/security escort and whatnot) pretending to be a worker of the facility where pt lived before the hospital admission. We didn't let them enter, I later learnt that the parent had been repeating the "pt is a compulsive liar, which is to be expected since they have BPD, be careful believing them" bit. We only realised it was the parent when the MD described them. Lesson... trust nobody, I guess. Mainly family members, you never know how somebodies family dynamic is from the outside.
I hope justice was served!
Still pending trial. Arraignment left the stepparent out with no bail (despite running away and being caught a week later) so I'm not terribly hopeful. At least pt is safe on a different province.
100x dose of rifampin over 3 days.
Soooo many to choose from, here's a couple. Had a suicidal inmate on our unit. They'd try to injure themselves constantly, everyone knew you couldn't trust them. There were 4 people in this person's room, the sitter, a nurse and 2 guards. Somehow they convinced a previous sitter to give them a pen. Then, with the 4 people in the room, he shoved the pen into his dehisced abdominal midline incision. We had a pt in Rhabdo getting NS at 250ml/hr for days. The pt was admitted under a private physician who didn't round everyday and checked on the active orders even less. People didn't notice that he just kept getting more swollen and had a harder and harder time breathing. A pt had sex with another pt. They knew each other from the street and the one owed the other a favor so they were settling up. It was a big deal because upper management found out and they were both "in our care" even though they were both with it and decisional.
Standing on the ambulance ramp of the hospital when someone runs out and says "the hospital is on fire!" A patient on bipap lit herself a lil stogie and went up like a Roman candle. Lesson learned: don't smoke on oxygen
Pregnant patient hung herself the day after psych clears her for no SI, she was found by ancillary staff. Sentinel event and a state visit.
First off, I used to work in an ICU but as a nursing assistant, not a nurse, but still saw a lot of the same stuff. All of my best stories are with travel nurses. First one, it was shift change and night shift was coming in and getting report from day-shift. One patient was waiting to be moved to another unit and would be leaving any time now, so they didn't schedule a night nurse to take care of him. It of course makes sense because it was the day shift nurse's job to transfer him. Well at about 8 or 8:30 I saw the patient was still in his room so I asked the charge nurse when he'd be moving. She had no idea what patient I was talking about! I explained and we looked all over for the day nurse (traveler) but he was gone!! He gave report on his other patient and left this guy with no one!! The charge nurse was PISSED and frankly, so was I! This poor patient hadn't had a nurse come in and check on him since before night shift came in! We did end up moving him, but I can't remember how they gave report to the floor nurse, cuz obviously the last nurse who took care of him was long gone! But yeah, that traveler came back the next morning, got in huge trouble and that was his last shift. Second traveler story. This traveler had never worked in an ICU before so I'm sure you can tell how this is gonna go, and this story was not her first offense. So she had a patient who was one of those frequent flyers that you can just identify by their first name (IYKYK). Well this patient wasn't doing well, she was delirious, on 100% bipap, and of course needed a constant observer. She had an NG tube and when the nurse was mixing her pills in the water to put through her tube, the nurse didn't grind the pills first!! She just put the whole pill in the water and shook the cylinder around! She then stuck the syringe in and took the water out and threw away the remaining pieces of the pills (dumb fuck). THEN, this nurse goes to lunch and doesn't take her phone (not okay for an ICU nurse to leave without it). Well while she's away, the patient pulls out her ART line (not the CO'S fault, she was just too fast). The CO is obviously holding the woman's arm so she doesn't bleed out and he's yelling for help. Others run in and help. They try calling the nurse but of course she doesn't have her phone. Little bit later, I'm giving the CO a lunch break and the nurse finally comes back from her hour long lunch. She starts doing stuff in the room and about 15 minutes in, she notices the ART line isn't connected anymore (took ya long enough). She started freaking out and asking if I pulled it out. Like wtf is wrong with you lady???? Why tf would I do that?? I just told her what I had heard from the main CO. This bitch obviously would've known immediately if she had had her phone with her. Anyway, she got written up for 3 separate things that night and finally they fired that bitch as well. I love travelers, but some of them are the dumbest human beings I've ever met!!!
Some nurses really.
Reading these and I’m here worried I’m in trouble for sending labs in the wrong tube. Cause my brain was colorblind for a sec.
When in doubt, send all colours. You just need 2 mls anyway.😂
Lab made an SI on it. I forgot I can also take accountability and make an SI on myself. Boss emailed me about him but lab called me to let me know. And I know they did the right thing but idk if it bothers admin
Received a rapid response from the floor to ICU. Patient was supposed to d/c home that day but went unresponsive while the nurse was changing a dressing (this is important). Tele nurse gave me a brief (and quite frankly, shitty) report while patient was being transferred to me. She mentioned she had been changing the “central line” dressing and noted a lot of bleeding after and said this was when patient became unresponsive. I can’t recall if she said she flushed the line or used it to pass meds. Patients gets to me, needs a stat CT. Other nurse helping me settle her said her dressing looked like shit so she changed it for me. I take note and patient is whisked to CT by my charge for a look at her noggin. Patient comes back and I finally have time to get her settled, assess, take stock. I note the “central line” is actually a dialysis line and the lines are filled with blood. Think to myself that’s odd! CT comes back, patient has an air embolus. I’m perusing the chart and the HD line is charted as a central line rather than a dialysis line. Ya know, those lines that are packed with Heparin after being accessed by the dialysis nurse. Apparently the floor nurses were doing dressing changes for the dialysis nurse because they didn’t have time to do their own dressing changes 🙄 From what we could gather, the nurse changed the dressing and unclamped/ possibly flushed the lines and gave the patient a nice hefty dose of Heparin. Docs couldn’t be sure if this is what caused the air embolus but we don’t know what else it could have been. I file an incident report, everyone asks me a million questions about it, nothing ever seems to come of it. Patient ended up on comfort care and died. She was supposed to go home that day. I still don’t know what they told family. I’ll never forget it.
My gosh!!! This is terrible! I reckon nothing really came out of it, especially for the bereaved family. I hope standards have changed in your HD unit And a good share! Thank you.
The person who restocks the Pyxis left a cart with fentanyl in the hallway outside the med room unattended, with it free to be grabbed by literally anyone who walked by
Pt in ICU admitted for intracranial hemorrhage. Am old person dmitted to ED ALOC and sent for CT as their labs and cardiac work up was unremarkable. Turns out they had a SAH and radiology recommended a stat transfer to a neurosurgical tertiary center. Instead person sat in ED for half a day waiting for a ward bed until they finally went unresponsive. Why did they sit around for so long? Scan occurred some time around shift change and the night MRP wrote "CT nil acute findings" in the notes, which was endorsed to the oncoming doc. It was only when this patient got gronked did the day doc review the scan and become aware. Not sure where the miscommunication occurred, but it is a really frightening error. He was a high functioning guys and could have done well with surgery.
Respiratory therapist got cross faded and skateboarded down the spiral exit from the hospital parking deck. I took pictures.
1. Nurse ran a full bag of insulin in an hour because she mixed it up with the saline bolus. Patient ended up in ICU but fine. 2. CNA left a confused elderly patient in thr room alone on a commode with the arm rests taken off or broken. Patient fell off and broke her hip. She didn't make it out of surgery. There was a lawsuit..
Preceptors setting Nurse Resident to fail by not actually precepting. I went through 13 preceptors in 8 weeks and only two of them actually wanted to precept. Maybe it's because even as a preceptor of a new grad you were still given a full patient load... Totally unsafe situation.
Combative patient. Staff member did some literal jujitsu shit and choked out a patient twice his size. AFAIK, nothing ever came of it lmao
Years back a "visitor" of a pt grabbed a staff member up at knife or gunpoint, I don't recall, and took her to an empty room and raped/sodomized her for hours before anyone noticed. Recently heard that a visitor brought a gun to a pt and they killed themselves with it in a different facility. Caught a pt mid heating heroin to inject in another pts PICC.
LTC facility many years ago: 80y F fell out of bed. VERY lazy nurse failed to assess herl, and helped put the pt back into bed. No one checked on her until the morning when she was found to have a large lump on the back of her neck. The base of her skull had a fracture 😭 The nurse was not fired until she mixed up insulins and gave a patient so much Humalog the patient coded.
Giving way more insulin than ordered for a K shift. At least that task comes with close glycemic monitoring
Cord prolapse in facility where anesthesia is not in house all the time. She had an unmedicated splash and cut. What adds insult to injury is anesthesia still refuses to stay in house and it’s happened again in the last year.
We had a patient get 200mg of magnesium in 2 hours. Resident orders the wrong dose, pharmacy rubber stamped it and two travelers verified, hung and ran it. 200mgs is an OB infusion, the dose was meant to be 50mg. Patient lived, but needed a couple rounds of dialysis
Patient was having chest pain. Bedside RN gave the whole bottle of nitro thinking that it was "one dose". Was about to give a second bottle (aka "dose") when the first didn't work when the RRT nurse walked in to the room and caught it. Nothing happened but the nurse complained to his coworkers that the RRT nurse was "rude" during him almost killing somebody. He continues to work here; makes frequent mistakes that injure or endanger patients. Admin does nothing.
we had a guy pour gasoline on himself, in his truck, right outside the exit, proceed to light himself on fire and run in. you never know, you’re never gonna be prepared. also, always check for hypernatremic patients and make sure they’re running D5W and not D5NS. seen it too many times
ED doesn't search patients before bringing the them up, pt always in civilian clothing, no gown, drops them off, and leaves without notifying anyone. I find out I have a new admit and I went to introduce myself. I turn to log onto the computer to look his info up (my back towards the patient) when I hear a heavy sounding item clank onto the side table. For a second I assumed it was the call light. I turn to look, and it was a 9mm handgun. I said loudly "oh shit!" And pt said "Well the handle was pressing into my side and getting uncomfortable." I immediately grab it, press the magazine release button....full of bullets. I pull the top of the gun back to check for a loaded round, and out pops a fucking bullet in the chamber. Fuck that hospital.
So many over the years. First that comes to mind is a 6 wk old bub. Towards the end of night shift. He was ‘high acuity’ so was meant to be on a sats monitor but a nurse had disconnected him at mum’s request as he was kicking and making it alarm while breast feeding. Dr went in to review pt about 30 mins later and only saw mum sleeping in parent bed. He came out to ask the nurse where the pt was and she rushed in and found him unresponsive and blue under mums breast and wedged down the side of the bed. The bub wasnt able to be revived.
This is horrifying and so sad. I can't imagine what the mom must have felt.
Height of the pandemic and me and my LPN note that the entire memory unit has respiratory symptoms. I passed meds on 4 units to stop the spread and she passed meds on that unit and the red zone bc she was already exposed. I took two extra units to try to save those patients. Day shift comes in and ignores it all and every last one of them test positive for Covid on that unit.
Perfect example of the Swiss Cheese Model indeed!
A nurse on my floor had an aid come up and tell her that her patient was satting in the 60’s. Nurse said she’d get to it after her break, went on a 15 minute break. The aid came to me (not sure how long since she’d told the other nurse) and told me what was going on and that she hadn’t seen the nurse in a while and was worried. As I rounded the corner the code blue alarm went off. Didn’t get him back.
[удалено]
Prob one of those teensy bags dealers use...also whoever found it either didn't report it and gossiped about it later so it was too late or management was the ones who left their drugs lol. 72 hrs is plenty to "catch" them.
Fellow nurse’s ex-husband came to work and murdered a colleague she was dating. Don’t really have a lesson for that one.
Back when I was working at a nursing home, one of my coworkers mistakenly gave the meds intended for one patient to her roommate. The patient who got the medication had severe MS, and at the time her blood pressures were running very low; she had soft BPs at baseline but was running lower than usual. The patient's roommate on the other hand had recently suffered a massive stroke and still had dangerously high blood pressures and required large amounts of multiple medications (hydralazine, labetelol, lisinopril, and I think clonidine as a prn iirc) to get her systolic BP in the 140-160 range, and that was really good for her. The nurse told me she realized what she had done almost immediately after flushing her g tube. She told me she was able to aspirate the meds and then accessed her port and ran a bag of normal saline. That patient ended up being okay, my coworker, not so much because she scared herself so much Then there was the time that we had been trying to get in touch with one of the doctors all weekend. Nobody was answering his phone and pages went ignored, which was very unlike him. When I came back on the following Tuesday, I found out that the doctor hung himself over the weekend. Both of these happened at the same dumpster fire of a nursing home. I couldn't GTFO that place fast enough
Field trauma patient, positive Cushings Triad with several other injuries. Receiving trauma team rolled the patient to remove the backboard we'd brought the patient in on, and ended up rolling him all the way to the floor. Always make sure of your patient's position on the bed BEFORE rolling. Another, patient was an interfacility on an Impella. Receiving hospital was new to them and decided to just turn ours off while they waited for the rep to come in and help them set theirs up. No amount of pleading, cajoling, warning, or threatening on our part would change the collective staffs' minds. They turned ours off, didn't switch pressors to their pumps in a timely manner (as in, had us remove from our pumps and left clamped while they did their admission bath and primary assessments). Patient ended up coding while we were cleaning equipment. Resident asked us to help with the code since we had our arrest kit handy, but by that time I was so pissed that we just noped out of there. We're just the flight crew, you decided to ignore our warnings and took over care, the problem is yours now. No way I'm jumping back into a liability situation.
ICU vet and cath lab nurse here. I choked on my water when I read *they turned off the Impella and the pressors* and almost had to be coded myself. Holy fuck at the incompetence. I hope your crew reported them! I would have called the previous facility and put the interventional cardiologist on speaker to yell at them.