A Journalist Gets It Right (and he's not from the UK)

He is an Editor turned Nurse turned Editor from the Wall Street Journal. This is a huge Newspaper in the US.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117738203850080018-lMyQjAxMDE3NzI3NTMyODUyWj.html

This is the kind of stuff we need to see from British Journalists. Here are some excerpts.

"In 2002, at age 40, I left my job as a page-one editor at The Wall Street Journal, my professional home of 15 years, to take a giant leap of faith -- in myself. Like a lot of people, I questioned my purpose after Sept. 11, 2001. Jolted from the complacency of a comfortable career, I became convinced that I could achieve selfish fulfillment through devotion to service -- to the individual, to the community, to the vulnerable.

I considered teaching. I considered law, medicine, pure science and research. But my thinking always returned to the nurses I had watched care for my mother a few years earlier, when she lay in an intensive-care unit in her final illness. I marveled at the way they melded an aloof, precise professionalism with a mysterious human (and humane) instinct. They seemed to operate in a purer space, beyond worldly distractions. I would be a nurse."

And



"My skills were those of any new nurse. With easily shattered confidence, I could start an IV, administer medications, bathe a bed-bound patient and change linens, change dressings, insert all sorts of catheters and tubes, read lab results and electrocardiograms. I knew to be vigilant against infection, pneumonia, pressure ulcers, medication errors and the many other lurking threats to hospital patients. On the burn unit, pain control loomed large. I also knew, as both executor of treatment plans and patient advocate, to keep a close eye on what doctors ordered. They make mistakes, too.

But in those first months, I felt stupid and slow, and thus dangerous. I hadn't yet mastered the ruthless efficiency of thought and motion that lent veteran nurses the appearance, at least, of enviable ease. Next to my crazed back-and-forthing, they floated around the unit, maintaining a cool composure no matter what crisis erupted.

The night began with the shift change, from 7:30 to 8. "The arrival of the replacement killers," as one nurse liked to put it. We straggled in, one by one, from the locker room to the nurses' station, crowding around the assignment sheet, groggy from unsatisfying daytime sleep.

Assignments were subject to wide variations. Typically, a critical but stable patient, often on mechanical ventilation, came with a second and even a third patient, in less serious condition, perhaps even a "walkie-talkie" -- alert, oriented and ambulatory, in clinical nurse-speak. If the rooms were spaced apart, I could look forward to spending 12 hours trotting like Edith Bunker back and forth across the unit, from patient room, to med room, to supply room, to another patient's room, to supply, back to the first patient's room, and on and on.

Already thin, I lost weight as a nurse.

Shift change was a noisy time, as day nurses, relieved to be relieved, gave "report" to the night nurses. I was anxious during report. For my patients' sake, I couldn't miss details -- "He may try to yank out his feeding tube," "You may need to bump up the sedation" -- but I was already parceling out the time. Second hands relentlessly swept the clocks mocking me from the walls.

Basic nursing duties were enough to keep me on my feet until dawn: initial head-to-toe physical assessments; hourly vital signs and other monitoring tasks; medications; bed baths and dressing changes; regular suctioning. First thing, I reviewed my patients' charts, checking for any outstanding physician orders that might devour precious minutes -- a blood draw for early lab work, perhaps, or an order to start tube feedings, or, as encountered one night, hourly enemas.

There could be no skimping, no coasting through a shift because of a headache or trouble at home. For 12 hours, I belonged to people whose survival was at stake. A sloppy physical assessment could later explode in disaster if a potential problem -- a bum IV, an incipient pressure ulcer, abnormal lung sounds -- went unnoticed. Rooms required meticulous inspection, too, to ensure that vital equipment was present and functioning: A missing bag mask -- attached to those blue vinyl footballs you see TV doctors and nurses rhythmically squeezing in emergencies -- could cause lethal delays.

Then came 9 o'clock medications -- for me in my early days, 9:15ish at best. Patients received as many as a dozen medications at once: injections, IV infusions and pills, either swallowed or crushed in mortar and pestle, dissolved in water and squirted down a feeding tube with liquid meds. Ointments applied, eye drops administered. For one patient, I could spend 30 minutes just gathering it all together and double-checking it for safety.

Burn care was a nightly abyss to be crossed with every patient. It was a big, messy, smelly job that demanded painstaking attention to detail. We usually helped each other or enlisted a patient-care technician -- the latter a negotiating tactic I began to cultivate after that night working alone without the lubricated mesh I needed. We had to work fast because burns impair the body's ability to regulate temperature; exposure can cause life-threatening hypothermia. And simply moving and turning a patient can cause blood pressure to soar or the heart to jump into a dangerous rhythm.

These were the basic functions, and on an uneventful night, I could just manage them -- the tasks themselves, and the documentation of them. If it isn't documented, the saying goes, it wasn't done.

I wanted to hover over my charges like a jealous hound, alert to the tiniest shifts in their biological function. I talked to my patients, to assess their mental status and their pain, to dispel their fears, to teach them about their conditions and treatments, and to learn details about their lives that might affect healing and recovery beyond the burn unit. But I felt hurried, with little time for the reassuring smile and comforting touch one sees on TV commercials that laud nursing as the caring profession.

Most nights, unexpected contingencies unwound the tight choreography of the shift, diagrammed in hourly increments in the sprawling spreadsheets of patients' charts. I lurched from one task to the next, fulfilling all requirements, but little more.

For a while, the electronic thermometers we used were in short supply, and the shift started with a mad dash to nab one. We made a joke of it, but behind the laughs, I heard the clock ticking. Infection control slows down all movement: Hands must be washed before and after every contact with a patient, and fresh gown and gloves donned every time one enters a patient room, to be discarded when exiting. A thermometer or any other piece of equipment moved from one room to another must be cleaned, too.

Often, it seemed, I came on shift to discover a clogged feeding tube. I had to pull the tube, insert a new one (in the nose, down the esophagus), and then wait for X-ray confirmation of correct placement in the patient's stomach before feeding could resume.

An order for bedside dialysis for a patient in acute kidney failure entailed mastering a contraption that looked like a prop from "Lost in Space" -- a big beige metal box on wheels, with knobby green and red lights flashing, rotors whirring, alarms buzzing. It came with printed instructions. Even so, obtaining the necessary solutions from pharmacy, priming the machine, attaching it to the patient and getting it running took a couple of hours, and then a lot of catching up.

A medication missing from the med room could prompt a trip down dark corridors to the pharmacy and back. Blood sent to the lab went bad before it could be tested, requiring a second draw. Dressing supplies ran out, calling for creative solutions. Patients being taken out of deep sedation yanked out their feeding tubes and IVs and fretted with their dressings. A fire in the city could yield new admissions, to be parceled out among us. And of course, infection or shock or some other problem could turn a stable patient into an emergency.

Regardless of the job at hand, my mind raced through the list of others awaiting my attention, convinced that my own feelings of being overwhelmed compromised my patients' well-being. Twelve hours weren't enough. I finished my shifts breathless, and delivered to the day nurses confused, fractured reports before hopping a train home in the morning rush hour.

So it went for the first six or seven months of my nursing career. The 12-hour frenzies, worry about my patients and paltry sleep bred chronic fatigue. I was often in a fog: At home, I spooned coffee into my cat's food bowl, and mistook toothpaste for shampoo. One afternoon, I leaped out of bed, showered, dressed and noticed only as I was heading out the door that it was 10:00 a.m. I had been asleep an hour, and didn't have to be at work for another nine. A deep ache gnawed at my lower back. My feet felt like ragged stumps. I fell asleep in chairs, on subway trains, in taxis, at movies, at supper tables."

If you click on the link there is even more good stuff. He talks about how having one patient who requires your constant presence at the bedside causes your other patients to suffer and be at risk and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

This guy was on a burn unit with a small number of patients. I wonder how he would function in the NHS where the nurse to patient ratios cause the battle to be lost long before we come on duty.

Ladies and Gentlemen: We found a journalist who is not a learning disabled ,lying, incompetent pig. It is a special day.