WARNING: Slight grossness ahead. Having warned you, you're going to read on anyhow.
I was in the E.R. at Mount Sinai Hospital in the fracture room last night (not to worry, it was just a UTI, fairly common for me, I was in and out in about 3 hours during which I got some writing done) when I overheard the nurses giving medication to the patient in the cubicle next to mine:
Nurse: "So, you need 240 mg of (insert drug name here). We don't have the 240-mg pill, but we do have the 80-mg ones, so you'll have to take four."
Patient: "Wait...what?"
Nurse (more slowly, as if the patient doesn't understand): "We have the 80 mg pills. We don't have the big 240-mg pills. You need to take FOUR of these to make up for the big one."
I'm in the next cubicle, wondering whether I should pipe up and ask them to redo that math. But I'm not a nurse, I don't have a degree in medicine or health studies. I haven't taken a math class since high school. The most expertise I can lay claim to is that I avidly watch Grey's Anatomy and once enjoyed the days of PBS's Square One. Something told me at that point that it wasn't my place to speak up and tell them they only needed THREE 80 mg pills to make up for the dosage required (unless drugs have some weird overlap property that I'm unaware of? Anyone?)
Now I'm worried that my silence might have given an elderly woman a fatal overdose of her prescription meds.
As Mathman aptly preaches, you do, in fact, need math in many jobs...nursing included.
2 comments:
Seriously, you should have spoken up. Moral obligation trumps any possible social faux pas of interrupting in an overheard conversation. Plus, you could have discreetly told the nurse about the error our of earshot of the patient.
Most bystanders are not evil but simply guilty of inaction.
Medication errors are more common than people think. The government is launching an initiative to crack down on this sort of thing. In fact, it's a new hospital requirement that all discharge medications be reviewed before a patient leaves the hospital. I really hope they caught that one.
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