A nurse lists a dead patient as stable

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.

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.

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.

Ahh… ‘radar-vitals’ – my favorite.

As in every profession, there are some excellent nurses, lots of average nurses, and a few terrible, terrible nurses.

Com on docs, let’s not attack key members of our patient care team. They are just as overworked as well are.

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.

Actually, a dead patient is anything but stable – decomposition, after all, involves lots of biological activity.