Your life depends on it

If you end up in a hospital, any hospital, this is the care you should expect:

If you are in the hospital for a physical or mental illness you will have 3 different nurses a day. Sometimes if the nurses are working 12 hour shifts you will then have two nurses a day.

At the beginning of each shift each patient is assessed. This assessment includes, but not limited to:

• Vital signs
• Blood sugar reading (if necessary)
• Oxygen saturation reading
• A nervous system assessment
• A cardiac assessment
• A pulmonary assessment
• A gastric assessment
• A urinary assessment
• An assessment for pain

This may sound fairly basic, but if these assessments are not done; the patient could die.

Let me give you an example of a true story.

A man was admitted into a psychiatric hospital. He was psychotic. He was placed on an antipsychotic medication. Days and weeks passed, but he did not get better. He was gaining weight because of the antipsychotic medication. The man’s abdomen was distended. The man only spoke when spoken to. He did not complain.

As the weeks turned into months the man’s condition did not change with the exception that he slept a lot.

One day he began to have a seizure. The psychiatric nurses shipped him off the a medical hospital. The doctors at the medical hospital found that the man had an impacted bowel and it had opened up spilling poisonous waste into the abdominal cavity. The man went to emergency surgery only to die on the table.

The error the psychiatric doctors and nurses made was that NO GASTRIC assessment was done. The gastric assessment consists of listening to bowel sounds with a stethoscope in 4 quadrants of the abdomen. The patient is asked, when was the last time their bowels moved and if they are passing gas. Weight is monitored too. That’s it! If the psychiatric nurses or doctors had assessed this man every day as they were taught in college this death would not have occurred. His problem was PREVENTABLE. 

If you find yourself in the hospital make sure the nurses and doctors are paying close attention to all of your body systems. It is basic, but you life literally depends on it.

Tags: assessment, Hospital, negligence