Oxygen Wars

I had to go to work early today for another one of those annoying meetings and found out that my new name is Oxygen. My project is to have an oxygen flow meter next to every bed. The oxygen in the walls is useless without a flowmeter to access it. The shortage is so bad that sometimes we have to take the oxygen off of patients to give it to other patients who need it more. We shouldn't have to be triaging our patients and should anything go wrong, it is a huge lawsuit waiting to happen.

So, now I'm Oxygen. Unfortunately, it is my immediate boss who is responsible for ordering flowmeters. When I discovered that nugget of information, I was tempted to find another project, but my committee leader wouldn't hear of it. But once my project was announced, flowmeters appeared like magic in the patient rooms in my unit. Then, several promptly disappeared.

My boss was upset by the theft and refused to replace them until engineering could find a way to bolt the flowmeters to the walls. I didn't see any point in bolting them to the walls. We've tried that before and it didn't work. I have personally unscrewed or yanked flowmeters out of the walls, with plaster still attached, if I had a patient who needed oxygen. Do they really think that a screw can stop a determined nurse?

To me, the real question is why do people steal flowmeters? It was suggested that there is a black market for them and employees are selling them. That makes no sense to me. They don't cost much and can only be used by institutions with oxygen pipes in the walls. When I asked, "Do you really think that Holy Cross is buying our flowmeters on the black market" everyone laughed. My belief is that other units in our hospital are stealing the flowmeters because they need them for their patients.

To try and get evidence of motive to steal, I went into every hospital room to count flowmeters. We were missing 33. It's not just my unit that has this problem, it is the whole hospital. As long as other units are short flowmeters, it will not be possible to keep my unit properly stocked because other units will just sneak in and steal them. The answer is for every bed in the hospital to have it's own flowmeter. Then, there will no longer be a motive to steal. (I hope.)

The Director of Nursing has been informed of the situation and now I'm waiting to see what happens next.