Monday, October 30, 2006

Infection Control

One of the nursing students told this story about their day at another hospital in which they went around with the wound care nurse specialist.

They were working on a patient with a large abdominal wound, maybe their belly had dehisced, requiring absorptive dressings or a WoundVac. While they had the wound exposed the patient's regular nurse came in with oral medications for them to take.

The patient was a little shakey, and one of the pills spilled out of the medication cup which the nurse had handed to her. The pill fell into the open abdominal wound.

Okay. Yuck.

Then the nurse picked the pill up out of the wound and handed it to the patient, who swallowed it.

That is wrong on so many levels.

2 comments:

Eli Blake said...

I had a friend who worked as an orderly for awhile at a hospital in southeastern New Mexico and he told me that there was a surgeon there who used to operate in his 'lucky white shoes,' and he would have all sorts of junk on them from the operating room and would never wash them and show up for a surgery wearing them with God-only-knows-what on them.

Of course that was twenty years ago, but it's nice to know that sanitary standards haven't necessarily improved.

Anonymous said...

let's just say she was trying to avoid wasting the the expensive med :)