Assuming the nurses can read English.
Posted on 08/21/2010 2:56:51 AM PDT by Cardhu
Thirty-five weeks pregnant, Robin Rodgers was vomiting and losing weight, so her doctor hospitalized her and ordered that she be fed through a tube until the birth of her daughter.
But in a mistake that stemmed from years of lax federal oversight of medical devices, the hospital mixed up the tubes. Instead of snaking a tube through Ms. Rodgers’s nose and into her stomach, the nurse instead coupled the liquid-food bag to a tube that entered a vein.
“And she said, ‘Oh, Mom, she’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know, but now we have to take care of you,’ ” the mother recalled. And then Robin Rodgers — 24 years old and already the mother of a 3-year-old boy — died on July 18, 2006, as well. (She lived in a small Kansas town, but because of a legal settlement with the hospital, her mother would not identify it.)
Putting such food directly into the bloodstream is like pouring concrete down a drain. Ms. Rodgers was soon in agony.
“When I walked into her hospital room, she said, ‘Mom, I’m so scared,’ ” her mother, Glenda Rodgers, recalled. They soon learned that the baby had died.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Big government can’t do everything.
Its the cumulative effect of past government intervention that sets up a climate of impersonalization and governmental reliance such that we need new regs to fix the problems created by the old.
I’m with you! I’ve worked as an RN in several areas of the country—and to me, this is just NO excuse for stupidity like this!
I can’t even get my brain around this..............
Can we assume that nursing schools are selecting the brightest and best for that training and can we assume their clinical training is adequate before they are place on a hospital floor without supervision? I have my doubts.
The boilerplate justification for more regulation. Of course, the years in question run from 1981–1992 and then from 2001–2008.
Sadly, there is a LOT of pressure on the community college level nursing programs to graduate persons who are not qualified, in the interest of “diversity.” It is really tough for instructors to give accurate grades if they are low.
what in the hell should ‘federal’ regulations have with it, unless you are selling ‘federal regulations’
Yup. I had a friend in bioengineering who would tear his hair out over this. I saw a guy take a scalpel to a connector when it “just won’t go”. THERE”S a REASON it doesn’t fit moron.
Assuming the nurses can read English.
But you'll never hear a politician crying for any "Sensible Hospital Control Laws."(1)
An aside: I've had so many surgeries, and IV's I can't even count. But I learned almost from the start to politely ask the Nurse, "What's That In The IV?"
(1) ObamaDeathCare doesn't count as it will never fully go into effect. Well before 2014 it will be declared Unconstitutional by SCOTUS.
Yeah, I don’t like the way the article ASSUMES that everybody knows that more federal oversight is the solution to every problem but...
I’m a graduate student studying information science, and one of my main interests is cognitive science and patient safety. In my field we don’t make assumptions about “how stupid would you have to be”. Our assumption is that if an error can happen, sooner or later, over millions of trials, it WILL happen. Our opponents are those who insist that medical errors should be trained away, not the expensive and sometimes difficult process of redesigning for safety.
As a scientist, I don’t like to pronounce judgement without knowing all the facts. But it does seem like it would make sense that you couldn’t put a needle on a naso-gastric tube.
Well, there is a strong movement toward this kind of control. I think the biggest problem is that there are SO MANY more people that they are trying to take care of these days than in bygone years. The industry needs every help it can get to make things go more smoothly. In the meantime, the more educated everyone can be, such as you’re asking what’s in the IV, the better off we all are. Even if the name of the drug doesn’t mean anything to you, you’ve at least made the nurse double check. Nice idea.
The is the old saying “Nothing is idiot proof””
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True, as witnessed by the fact that you left re off the end of there, but this sounds like something that could benefit from some common sense design changes. Some things should be done without government mandates.
I worked many years doing electronic and electromechanical repairs and it sounds almost as though less thought is given to preventing mistakes in connecting medical devices than to preventing mistakes in wiring connections.
One particular piece of equipment I used to service in hospitals years ago had three large circuit boards with a dozen or more ribbon cables interconnecting them. All the ribbon cables were made so that the ends could not be connected if they were flipped the wrong way...EXCEPT for the main power supply cable which could easily be connected the wrong way, there was no asymmetry and no markings so that once disconnected it was not possible to determine which way it should be reconnected so I always marked the cable end and the matching receptacle before unplugging it. This was the only cable that could do major damage and it was the only one with no safeguard. It resulted in several instances of machines being fried to the point of requiring rebuild.
Unfortunately human beings are not easy to rebuild.
This person most likely has been incompetent from the beginning of their career.
I’ve been around computers long enough to remember when adding a new IDE device meant looking for the red stripe. Keying cables was a wise idea there where mistakes meant a few confused minutes of troubleshooting, and it’s certainly wise where the consequences are higher, as you mention.
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