nabeepchen

I think I’m going to start a new category called the Annals of Healthcare Horrors. While I’ve been tagging things nursing related under the category of Nursing Shortage, some of these stories really deserve their own place in the sun. You see, despite the much hyped nursing shortage, not much has changed in many facilities. It has been my battle cry all along, and now here are stories to back it up.

Here’s a great one. This is from a brand new nurse, fresh out of school, and on the job for six weeks. I have condensed it down, and omitted any identifying facts.

I’ve been on the job a month and a half, and while I’m supposed to be working 8 hour shifts, for the last two nights I worked 12 hours.

Last night I had 7 patients to care for alone, and I can’t even begin to tell you what hell that was. Tonight I had “only” 6, but 3 of them were unstable. Five were also on insulin, with one of them getting a dose every hour. I had dressing changes, blood glucose checks, every patient had several meds to be given…

I coudn’t handle it and asked for help, but all of the other nurses had more patients than I did–some had 9 or 10. I started crying. I just can’t do this.

Nursing orientation is supposed to be three months for a new grad. A brand new RN, unless she previously worked as an LPN, should not be expected to take on a full load of patients this soon, and all by herself without a preceptor. I suppose that they thought they were given her a “lighter” load since the other nurses had at least three more patients apiece to care for. There was no one available to back her up, to help her, to give her guidance.

Would you want to be a patient in this hospital? I surely wouldn’t. Especially, I would not want to be under the care of this scared, overwhelmed and severely under-experienced new nurse. And guess what? If she makes an error, and that may be quite likely, considering how sick her patients are and how much overtime she’s doing, then she will be blamed. The hospital will wash its hands of such an incompetent nurse.

For every story like this one, there are hundreds more happening at the same time. Now this particular nurse said that she is actively looking for a new job. So she’ll quit this dump, and then the hospital will whine about the “shortage” and how they can’t get anyone to work for them. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

And if this nurse is lucky, she will find a better job. But if her new job turns out to be much of the same, then she may end up leaving nursing completely, or at least, moving out of direct patient care. And so the world turns.

Sometimes you just don’t know what you’re getting. Three patients in Germany who thought they were going to get a new lease on life via an organ transplant now are struggling with rabies.

Bizarre as it may seem, these three patients received organs that were infected with rabies. The organs all came from the same donor, a woman who died of a heart attack, and who showed on symptoms of the disease.

Okay, I know, most people reading this will think–”well couldn’t they test for it? Couldn’t they see that she was sick?”

You can only find what you are looking for. As of this moment in medicine, we do not have a “universal” test which can identify every microbe, pathogen, disease state, and trauma lurking within the human body. There is no test for rabies other than examination of the brain, and that is not something routinely done for organ donors. And to actually test the organs for the presence of rabies is impossible in the very short time frame between death and transplantation.

Rabies, I should add, is extremely rare in developed nations, so there would hardly be reason to suspect it in anyone–unless it was known they had been bitten by an animal that could not be identified or that had rabies. While there have been cases of negligence in organ transplantation, there really was no way that the medical team coordinating the transplants could have known. Germany has had only 5 cases of human rabies in the past 20 years, so it really isn’t at the top of the list of possible infections that might be harboring into potential organ donors.

The horror in all this is that rabies is invariably fatal, and it is not likely that these patients, who were ill and weakened to begin with, will survive. On a more positive note, three other patients who also received organs from this woman are doing fine. Those who received her lungs, kidneys and pancreas also got what they didn’t want–rabies. But the patients who received her liver and corneas are alive and doing well.

The exact same thing happened last year in the U.S. Four people died of rabies after receiving infected organs from a donor in Arkansas. Like this German woman, he showed no signs of the disease, and no one would have ever suspected he was infected with rabies.