It doesn’t sound like the patient ever got past the triage nurse - can’t blame the doctors for that.
The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain.
The patient went to the ER three times for the same complaints, even HAD A RX for pain meds. So a doctor at some point did see her....
The news report doesn’t state that the Triage nurse didn’t tell the docs that the patient had returned so that is a question I would like to see raised. I would like to know what sort of pain meds were ordered for ABDOMENAL PAIN. What tests were run previously we don’t know.
I’m sick and tired of hospitals ready to dump on the poor nurses in these situations when obviously something is wrong with the whole diagnostic and treatment apparati in a lot of these institutions. Nurses can only take their cues from their superiors, ie the doc, supervisors and hospital administrators. While nurses are afforded a lot of autonomy, that autonomy of action is colored by the socio/bureau-cratic enviroments they have to practise in. The tendency of nurses to become a bit “tin-eared” is proportionately due to difficult to deal with hospital enviroment and ancillary services.
On call MD specialties such as surgeons can be extremely rude and hard to get a hold of, to the point that I have seen 30 year veteran nurses hesitate to call, thinking that patient X just is a drug seeker or is looking to get off the streets for a few days. So where are you docs? And why be nasty to us over the phones?...Hospitals are not 9-5 operations! What was going on that the triage nurse did not immediatley get the docs involved...was she cruel and burned out? Were the docs involved with trauma cases and couldn’t get to the patient?
When a fish first rots, it first stinks from the head.(an old yiddish saying)
One other point...the Doctor in charge of the ER is responsible for everthing that goes on in that ER, they set the tone and policies that the staff including the triage nurses have to operate under....I’ll wager that the triage nurse, if she didn’t seek help for this patient was under implied or official rules about not bothering the doc with such”trouble-some” “nuisance” cases. The Er doc’s like ship’s captains are responsible for everything that happens in their ER’s when they are on shift!