Iatrogenesis

Nurse-Patient Ratio Imagine you are in a hospital bed dealing with a tremendous amount of pain, and your nurse is not around to give you medication to put you at ease because he or she has five other patients and just has not gotten around to you yet. How does that make you feel? Look into the nurse 's perspective, they are running around for twelve or twenty-four hours because of being understaffed, while constantly checking on patients and also getting interrupted by family members complaints. How do you think the nurse feels? This issue occurs everyday in hospitals all around, and has been an ongoing issue for quite some time. The nurse-patient ratio is too high, giving a minimum amount of nurses to a maximum amount of patients. This makes nurses exhausted running from patient to patient, which leads to inadequate care for patients. The staffing of nurses needs to be increased for a decrease in medical and medication errors, reduced fatigue in nurses, and a decrease in patient complications. Medical and medication errors made by nurses are very dangerous. A medical error can be made by a nurse if they get patients mixed up. When getting patients mixed up, nurses will give treatments or medication to the wrong patients. Giving the wrong treatment can be dangerous depending on how big the treatment is. It could be a simple one like putting a cast on the wrong limb, or a huge one like sending a patient in for the wrong surgery. When a doctor prescribes medication to a…

Workflow Design: Clinical Scenario The purpose of this paper is to explore a clinical scenario, answer pertinent questions, and list out the correct steps for administering an oral medication according to the “five rights” of the medication administration process (Edwards & Axe, 2015; Hunter, 2011). In addition, a workflow diagram was created to demonstrate the process from start to end. Scenario Analysis As healthcare providers, nurses are trained to follow the “five rights” of the…

Barb Daily had been seeing her general practitioner for prenatal examinations, but repeated urine pregnancy tests were coming back negative. Barb’s practitioner thought about sending her to get an ultrasound, but he decided against it as it would be quite expensive and burdensome for Barb. The general practitioner is convinced by the repeated negative pregnancy tests and concludes that Barb had a missed abortion. During the dilation and curettage to clean out the uterus, the practitioner noticed…

The economic downturn of the 1990s created a need for more cost effective health care practices in Canada. Baumann & Blythe (2003) observed that during this time, reducing expenses became the focus for governments and institutions, and the majority of hospitals used a bookkeeping method of restructuring (p. 1566). Thus, the easy option of reducing human resources, the largest expenditure in running health care institutions, was taken without carefully planning and considering indirect or…

Dissociative Identity Disorder, previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is a psychological condition where one person’s identity is split into two or more separate personalities (Psychology Today). The condition has long been debated throughout history on its validity, as some scientists argue the condition itself may not be existent, instead hypothesizing that it is a side effect of therapist-patient probing. Despite the controversy, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) still holds a…

Working on a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in a large teaching hospital, there is a complex system of health care workers that make up the team assigned to a patient. Intern’s, resident’s, fellow’s, attending’s, new nurses, experienced nurses and other health care providers are all a part of a patient’s care team. The parents of these children tend to be available and present for the greater part of every day and they want to be part of the team caring for their child. Empowering parents goes a…

We all have different sides to us that change when we’re around family, friends, co-workers or even our significant other. But which one of those is the real us? Maybe it’s none of those; maybe it’s who we are when we’re alone. When we’re surrounded by certain people our personality shifts, not a significant amount, but we change. We can be calm, quite, goody two shoes with family and co-workers, but with friends we’re the craziest, most daring one in the group, and then with our significant…

Introduction Medical errors and unexpected side effects occur relatively often in the hospital setting, where in 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported that medical errors resulted in roughly 98,000 deaths per year, becoming the eighth leading cause of death for patients (Phillips-Bute, 2012). While this number is very alarming, the amount of public concern toward medical errors are nearly nonexistent, resulting in patients having little understanding of their rights when their health…

Does marijuana work in the treatment of diseases? What are its adverse effects on human body systems? What does professional say about this and its legalization? These are the questions flashing to the mind when the word marijuana is perceived. The author of this essay is trying to answer these questions by analyzing three articles on the topic of cannabis. Medical marijuana is one of the most controversial topics in today’s political and medical world. Though marijuana is useful in the…

Wall of Silence Journal Entry One Medical errors occur every day whether it is from a nurse or physician and because of it’s occurrence, it is publicized and raises concern in the community. My level of awareness was little despite hearing stories on social media and from people around me. As I became a nursing student, I realized that medical errors happen more often from common mistakes that are preventable and nothing is done to solve it. Gibson and Singh (2003) mentioned, “hospitals and…