I have decided to retell a story that a SICU nurse told me. I am going to use the first person narrative in order to keep things interesting yet anonymous.
I arrived for my normal 7 to 7 on Sunday morning. I got report from the night nurse and was given 2 relatively stable patients with the expectation of another admit. A couple of hours into my shift we, the SICU, received a patient from the OR who was unstable and needed labs and a chest x-ray immediately. Because I was light on patients, I was charged with him.
When I tried to order both the labs and x-ray, I ran into a roadblock; the patient was not in the computer system. Obviously he was a patient, he’d just come from the OR. Why in the world was he not in the system? I called down to admitting to see if they knew or could enter him into the system. They couldn’t because apparently he had come through the ER. I called the ER to ask them to put him into the system; they sent me back to admitting.
By the time I finished this game of ping-pong, there had been a 20 minute delay in care and the doc on call was furious and of course took it out on me. We eventually got everything straightened out and the patient officially admitted and stabilized.
This should never have happened and would not have happened during the normal work week. On the weekend, there is less auxiliary staff and services and unfortunately mistakes happen. Given, this is not something that happens every week or even every month, but it happened and who’s to say it won’t happen again.
