Sunday, August 26, 2012

Reinventing the wheel and the dangers of technology

Seems like every day we reinvent the wheel because apparently it wasn't round enough the first time.

Everyday with shift change and a new nurse they somehow end up screwing up his schedule. Not sure if it's incompetency or the fact they rely too much on technology/ the computer. We do see a huge change in service compared to the ICU. During shift change they are supposed to give report to the next nurse but somehow I don't think this is happening here. It works well in the ICU. Not so well on the regular floor. We had everything from a nurse literally rushing into our room throwing his meds on the bed and leaving (no, not because there was emergency somewhere else) to nurses coming in wanting to give Valium or methadone again when he just got his last dose 1.5 hours ago. (This would never happen in the ICU. We had to beg the docs before to give Valium at 3.5 hours instead of the minimum 4 hour interval). Apparently the computer said to give it "now". Well this "now" was two days ago when we had to give an extra dose and ended up moving his 6 am dose to 4 am and hence the next one to 8. I know it can get confusing. At home we usually write everything down when it differs from routine because we end up forgetting what happened when, with all the other million things happening at the same time. Relying solely on the computer and no longer practicing independent thinking can be a very dangerous thing, especially in the healthcare setting.

I double and triple check everything at home (I had to throw Meds out before because I couldn't remember if I grabbed the right bottle and checked the label, because the bottles all look the same and the meds look the same). I expect the same at the hospital especially when they have a nurse AND a tech assigned to each patient. Honestly, every time we are on the regular floor we wonder If any studies have been done to show that having nurses AND techs actually improves patient care as we have yet to experience the benefit. To us it is more of an annoyance because it is another person constantly coming in and out of the room disturbing our sleeping angel.

This is why it is such a hard decision to come to the hospital, we can do so much at home with all our equipments, and while we always try to get admitted to the ICU if we must be admitted, this time since his breathing was OK (and it is usually why we come to ER), we had no choice but to agree to a regular floor admission.
And we truly saw the limitation of the "regular floor" for Jagger, simply put, he is way too complex for the regular floor!

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