9.
“I worked as a critical care nurse in a very busy cardiac unit in the Bay Area. Part of our job was to be assigned to go to departments where studies were being done, such as Interventional Radiology, if a very ill patient needed an RN to observe him during the procedure. I got called to take over for the patient’s RN so she could go to lunch. The wife was standing in the doorway as I arrived. The wife told me that the previous nurse had ignored the patient’s complaint of banging his leg on the side of the bed as they positioned him for the procedure. I asked her to show me before the procedure began, and she pointed to the middle of his shin. There was no redness or swelling; the skin was not broken or discolored. We proceeded with the procedure, and I brought him back to his room. Nothing more was said about it by the wife or the patient.”
“After putting him back to bed, I completed my charting and entered a progress note for the doctor to see when he next looked at the chart. There was no need to call the doctor, as nothing was damaged. I filled out a new skin flow sheet, noting the complaint and exactly where it occurred. I even included a Polaroid photograph of the skin with the measuring tape included in the photo. At the end of the shift, I reported the ‘incident’ to the next shift and notified the supervisor.
Several months later, I got called in to the hospital nursing manager’s office to meet with a representative of the State Board of Registered Nursing. What do you know, it was about that man’s leg! She started interrogating me. I asked for my union representative to come in. In the meantime, I did show her the charting that I had done, including the skin flow sheet.
Wouldn’t you know, nobody else on the floor charted anything else during the duration of his stay! The BRN rep was trying to get me to say that I had neglected this patient, but by the end of the session, after showing her all of the charting (she never read the chart before that meeting!), she actually asked me if I would consider taking a job with the BRN as an investigator! I said thank you very much, but the State can’t afford me, and I left.”
—Anonymous, 72, California