When Nurses Make Mistakes Article Words

During morning rounds, the medical team had decided to delay the patient’s chemotherapy by a day, but late that same afternoon the doctor in charge told me that the chemo would, in fact, start that night.

One of my patients had a new diagnosis of cancer and was going to the operating room to get a permanent intravenous line placed in her chest.

The doctor was instantly reassuring, saying the data showed no difference in treatment effect if the second drug was started at the same time as or slightly later than the first drug.

We’ve all made mistakes, most of them small and inconsequential to the patient’s health, but sometimes the mistakes are serious.

I printed out article after article on that particular chemo regimen and read them in a bizarre form of intellectual self-flagellation.

She was very hungry, but I couldn’t get a meal from the hospital kitchen, so I took out bread and peanut butter from our pantry and made her a sandwich.

But even when your mistake is caught and a potential crisis averted, you are left with the knowledge that you almost harmed a patient you were trying to protect.

My penance was twofold.

If my error endangered my patient in any way, I had completely failed in the most fundamental obligation of the job.

I worried that the patient’s treatment had been compromised and that she might die from her disease because of my mistake.

If my error endangered my patient in any way, I had completely failed in the most fundamental obligation of the job.

And then this doctor said something that made a huge difference to me, and it’s a sentiment I think about often.