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QUALITY QUICKIE: Kentucky hospital dismisses 14 nurses

I am deeply puzzled by this one.  Apparently patients on respirators sometimes try to pull their tubes out of their throats in a panic, and administering such patients Diprivan immediately calms them and potentially saves their lives. A hospital in Louisville, Kentucky has  fired 14 nurses for giving the sedative to patients on respirators without a doctor’s order.  Now I am not an expert on clinical procedures so take everything I say as opinions held very gently, but…..

a) Wouldn’t there or shouldn’t there typically be a standing order from the doctor as to what a nurse should do if a patient starts trying to pull their respirator out?
b) If (at least) 14 nurses were routinely doing this, it is definitely a system problem.  Should not the hospital have been educating the nurses about the rules before they fired them, as they apparently are doing now for those not fired? Has anyone in the hospital management been fired for allowing so much to go wrong on their watch?
c) Is it realistic for nurses to know these rules? On Saturday I watched a baseball play-off game where a hitter being paid over $4 million a year failed to score the winning run because he mis-interpreted a rule.  Yet he’s in the game I’m watching as I type this on Monday night!
d) A nurses’ association is trying to unionize this hospital.  Were those nurses fired purely for the sedative offence or were they involved in union activities?
e) Who creates the Kentucky Board of Nursing standards? Am I suspicious, or might a core of doctors be involved here. Don’t forget that several states restrict midwives from delivering babies, and even prosecute them, when in most other countries they are a core part of the labor and delivery system*, and there is very credible evidence that using midwives for routine births is safer than using OBGYNs.  Those rules came from the political power of organized medicine. Is something similar going on here regarding the ability of nurses to encroach on anesthetists turf?

I don’t know the answers to this issue.  But this mass firing looks like a symptom of a wider disease at this and probably other hospitals.  If you have comments, please email me and I’ll follow up later.

*For example, while the United States has 35,000 obstetricians and about 5,000 midwives, Great Britain has 32,000 midwives and fewer than 1,000 consultant obstetricians.

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