Jane was working on the open heart unit. She was a cardiac care nurse,
which is not the surgical patients but the heart attack patients, the
stent patients, etcetera. She was taking care of a patient who was like
eighty or ninety pounds and had had a catheterization and a stent
placed. It was a very nervous patient, so when she would wake up, she
would be crying. Jane would comfort her. She was very experienced with
these kinds of patients, held hand pressure when she removed the, oh I
can't think of the name, but the tubing that goes into the
groin for it. The woman would cry every time she woke up and would say
she was in terrible pain. So at one point, Jane was flushing the line,
because aggrastat was going through the line at a very short pace, so
you had to flush it to be able to see if it was dripping at all. The
patient expressed relief when Jane flushed the line, so Jane, as a part
of her assessment to the physician, she reported that the patient is
expressing pain. She says, "There is no indication that
it's cardiacrelated. And when I flushed the line, she
expressed relief." She says, "I think that anxiety is
the cause of it." And the doctor went in and evidently, he
confirmed that, because he wrote out a prescription for Xanax, which is
an anxiety drug. But it's that thing, the flushing of the
line and the saying that the patient expressed relief, which was really
a part of her nursing assessment, that became the basis for what they
did to her.
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When the patient went to sleep, Jane went off the floor and left her in
the charge of an agency nurse, inexperienced. When Jane came back from
her lunch, the agency nurse says, "Oh, it was terrible. As soon
as you left, she woke up. She was in pain. I didn't know what
to do. So I ask another nurse and she said give her morphine and so I
gave her morphine." So Jane says, "You gave my patient
morphine? There was no order for morphine. She's only ninety
pounds. That's very dangerous. There's no order
for that. Why?" So Jane went looking for the order, because the
nurse said, "I don't know. Becky said
she'd get the order, she would write the order." So
Jane finds it and it has been written above where Jane had signed off.
In charting terms, this other nurse has made it appear that a
doctor's order was there when Jane signed it off that
wasn't.
So Jane went to confront that nurse and "Why did write above my
name? You can't do that. If you get an order from a doctor,
you write a new space down below. You don't make it look like
it was done by somebody else. It was an order taken by somebody
else." So Jane was furious about that and confronted that nurse
and that nurse had not even signed her name on it. So Jane says,
"Well, who did you talk to?" She says well, she
didn't know who she talked to, but she had gotten the order.
Jane never believed that she had talked to a doctor. She believed that
she had simply written it in and given the morphine and gone on. That
was what, Jane reported that whole thing that we couldn't
have a situation where nurses wrote above your name and put in orders
without talking to a doctor and this was a terrible thing and this
shouldn't be. No one paid any attention to it. She tried to
report it to the charge nurse. The charge nurse said he was too busy to
write it up and send it to the supervisor. So Jane did that. She wrote
it up and sent it to the supervisor. I mean, there was no to do over
this, nothing.
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A week later, she was called in supposedly on an investigation of this
and they had turned Jane saying that the patient expressed relief when
she flushed the line into Jane had given a placebo rather than morphine,
which she should have given to save the person's life, which
didn't make any sense. But that was the basis of the charge,
that Jane had illegally given a placebo without a doctor's
order. The hospital tried to make it that she should have taken the
action to call a doctor and get a morphine order, which we eventually
proved that that was garbage. But that was what the hospital was
accusing. They were saying that Jane had improperly responded to the
woman's pain.