“It was poor charting.”
Related posts:
- Check lists for patient safety
- A dementia patient was found with a dead rat in his mouth
- Templated charting
- On medication lists
- Bingo
- Manipulating waiting lists by giving unnecessary cancer treatments
- A doctor in Cuba becomes a nurse in the United States
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 13 comments }
When I was a med student about 19 years ago at VA hospital a patient had normal vitals posted on the chart during the night 120/80 – 70 – 18. However when he was found dead the next morning on rounds interogation of his telemetry moniter showed flatline for over 8 hours.
Oh, come on! That’s as stable as you cen get.
Same rogue nurse at my VA in Columbia MO when I was a student. The patient was found dead on rounds with the surgical team. The death certificate was filled out and the morgue notified. The nurse only stopped charting vital signs when the chart was picked up by the pathologist 6 hours later.
For what should have been a career ending debacle anywhere else, there never was any apparent consequence for the nurse. Of course this was also the same VA hospital where at the same time a nurse was killing patients with succinylcholine (http://www.kaiserpapers.org/vanurse.html). He went on to a career killing nursing home patients after he left the VA.
yes. how about when they chart bp 60/40 and you have to READ it on the chart in the morning on rounds.. (IE they didnt CALL ME). that happened in my surgical internship.
I was always amazed how all four patients in a room at my training VA hospital always had the same vital signs as each other. The place was famous for miracles.
you mean “20″ isn’t a normal respiratory rate? i always thought i was just really calm, breathing at like 10-12.
Ahh… ‘radar-vitals’ – my favorite.
As in every profession, there are some excellent nurses, lots of average nurses, and a few terrible, terrible nurses.
Strictly speaking, dead patients are in fact exceedingly “stable”.
John
Com on docs, let’s not attack key members of our patient care team. They are just as overworked as well are.
Come on Concierge the nurse was charting stable on a DEAD patient. If that isn’t professional malfeasence I don’t know what is. I really haven’t figured out what you have to do (or not do) in the VA system to actually get fired. What a sad way to treat our vets.
The key members of our healthcare team are the nurses who actually take the vital signs, not the chart jockies.
What really tells the tale about what is wrong with our government is that these folks never get fired. All sorts of excuses are made such as citing what they contribute. But the fact is, if they can’t be trusted, you are better off with the task to not be done at all. I would rather see no vital signs be charted than to not be able to trust what is that–if I see a blank, I know that I need to take them myself if I want to know. The malfeasance is due to laziness. The failure to fire them is also due to laziness and cowardice.
It really tells the tale about our institutions and culture that people excuse lying on medical records.
As a medical student in the VA I complained that the resident made us take everyone’s vitals ourselves every morning. One day we found one dead, cold, and starting to stiffen–the VA nurse had charted normal vital signs 20 minutes before.
I never complained about that again.
If you really want to know something and don’t have experience validating the integrity of the specific individual reporting, check yourself.
Actually, a dead patient is anything but stable – decomposition, after all, involves lots of biological activity.
Comments on this entry are closed.