WHY THE PUBLIC SHOULD LOVE EMERGENCY NURSES

As part of my fellowship in Critical Care Medicine, I worked as an anesthesiologist at the George Washington University Hospital and at the National Children’s Hospital in D.C. An anesthesiologist chooses his own drugs, draws them up in a syringe, and injects them intravenously—by himself. In order to avoid mistakes I developed routines that included lining my drugs up in the order that I would use them and labeling them myself. In the emergency department, 99% of all drugs—oral, IM, or IV, are administered by emergency nurses. In the OR an anesthesiologist has only one patient at a time. In the ED the emergency physician may be managing five to twenty patients at one time. He is continuously writing orders and barking verbal orders for different nurses to give to multiple patients. Despite his/her best efforts, eventually every emergency physician will write the wrong drug order for a patient, or right the correct drug order on the wrong chart, or give the wrong verbal order for an intravenous drug, or order the wrong dose for a patient. 99% of the time your mistake is caught by the emergency nurse. The ED nurse will give you that skeptical look, or touch your forearm and point to your own incriminating handwriting, or whisper that question that sends chills down your spine: “Are you sure you want to do that?” Trust me, if you are an emergency physician, you don’t want to do whatever you wrote. You need to rethink. And then you need to say “thank you.” My point is that the public should recognize and appreciate that emergency nurses prevent doctors from killing them accidently.