. Advocacy is a big thing that nurses do
. Advocacy is a big thing that nurses do
I need a 2 or 3 sentence comment for each paragraph…Thank you
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In the nursing profession, we wear many hats when caring for our patients. Advocacy is a big thing that nurses do for their patients on a regular basis. We as nurses are the primary advocate for the patient, we are the ones at the bedside for long periods of time. Many of the medical doctors do depend on our assessments of the patient to be able to tell them what is going on with the patient. Many times, I have found in my short career the doctors are very open to suggestion when planning care for the patient. However, I have also found the opposite where you keep telling them and paging them to give some sort of orders because the patient condition is worsening and sometimes they do not listen until something bad happens with the patient condition. For example, I had a patient who was in the hospital for shortness of breath, patient was intubated in the field for hypoxia which was not resolved with other measures. I received the patient on the second day of admission and the patient was sedated on diprivan and on two vasopressors to keep the blood pressure up. At the start of the shift, the patient assessment was what was endorsed to me and maybe varied by one or two slight changes. However, because of the slight changes I still considered the patient to be critical but somewhat stable. At about two pm, however, I noticed that the heart rate was climbing from 80s, where the patient had been hovering most of the day, to 130s. The doctor was notified, he first said it is fine it is probably because we gave him lasix. However, I still was not happy with this answer, because to me that was a significant jump. So then I went into the room and did a third complete head to toe assessment; I then went back to the doctor and asked him to assess the patient as well because I found that the patient’s breathing pattern on the vent had changed from this afternoon and his lung sounds are more diminished on the left side. So the doctor grudgingly came to the room to assess the patient with me and agreed that something was off with the patient. After a chest xray and a chest cat scan, it was found that the patient had a community acquired pneumonia which had not presented on the original x ray and the patient had a pulmonary embolism; which caused the change in his breathing and heart rate.
