Tuesday, October 10, 2006

just make the call

When a patient deteriorates and one or more of their vitals (heart rate, blood pressure etc) reach a certain level/number, the healthcare worker that notices these changes are required to make an emergency call through switch which will then page the team looking after the patient and/or a specialised team that only attends to emergencies. then those page will come running to the patient's bedside... ok, i'm exaggerating, they never run, some walk in at a faster than usual pace, others just stroll in.

Now, it's should be that these calls usually are made by the nurses, (cos usually it's the nurses that spend most amount of time with the patients, when they are not at their mandatory tea/meal breaks) but a lot of the nurses don't want the responsibility of making these calls, in case it turns out to be nothing. instead they'll page the intern to get them to come and see the patient and be responsible in making the decision to make the call.

I've been asked by nurses to access patients that clearly satisfied an emergency call at least twice now, but i often forget that they'd already satisfied the criteria for the call. Both times, i hesitated for a few seconds before making the call, cos other then the one vital that was off, the patients otherwise looked well enough. But i'm pretty glad that i made the call both times.

Once was for a patient that suddenly started breathing very quickly. It turned out he had APO (sudden accumulating of fluid in his lungs) from a heart-attack.

The other time was for a patient that had a heart rate of 180. It turned out that she had SVT (sorry, to hard to explain) and didn't respond to repeated administration of adenosine (a medication that sorta makes the heart-stop and restart) and needed to be transferred to a monitored bed.

So the lesson is:

just make the call, after checking that the vitals (eg heart rate, blood pressure, etc) are taken correctly. better be safe than sorry.

Addit:
what a coincidence!! just realised that someone else just blogged about almost exactly the same thing on http://barbadosbutterfly.blogspot.com/!!

posted by zhinger @ 7:23 pm

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