Blame The Nurse

The doctor wrote an order to give the patient two units of blood, so that is what the nurses did. The doctor was so angry afterwards that he wrote the nurses up. Why was he angry at the nurses? Because he meant to order fresh frozen plasma and ordered regular blood by mistake. The nurses failed to read his mind.

Perhaps if the nurses had checked the patient's blood count they would have wondered why the doctor ordered blood since the red blood cell count was normal. And maybe if they had checked the patient's bleeding time, it would have occurred to them that the patient needed plasma or platelets. But really, shouldn't it be the doctor's job to decide what kind of blood product the patient needs? After all, he is the one who went to medical school. If the nurses had caught his mistake that would have been nice, but I think it's a bit much for him to be angry because the nurses didn't second guess him. I'm glad that I wasn't working last weekend when this happened or I would be in trouble too.

This same doctor this evening made a mistake when he got a consent for surgery. He planned to do one procedure and got a consent for a different procedure. That's a good way for us to get sued. This time a nurse did second guess him and called and asked if the consent was what he wanted. It wasn't, so the patient was consented again. The doctor was lucky this time and so was the nurse, he would have written her up if she had failed to find his mistake.