Sally Jones is a 36-year-old new registered nurse (RN) who graduated 6 months ago from a community college with an associate degree in nursing. Sally worked her way through school as a licensed practical nurse in a pediatric unit of a local hospital.
After passing her RN exams, she moved to a larger city and was hired to work the evening shift on the pediatric unit as a primary care nurse. Her patient load is usually six pediatric patients, and she has a nursing assistant working under her supervision. Sally has been bothered recently by discrepancies regarding the credits of intravenous (IV) solutions given in handoff report.
For example, she was told at report yesterday that 150 mL remained in one patient’s bag of IV solution, but upon making initial patient rounds, she found the IV machine beeping and had to hurriedly replace the bag.
At the previous hospital where she had worked, it was a unit policy that all pediatric patients have their IV solutions observed by both oncoming and outgoing primary nurse at shift change so such discrepancies could be discovered and corrected prior to departure of the outgoing shift. She feels this was a good policy and would like to see a similar policy implemented at her new place of employment.
Janey
NUR 201
Grand Canyon University
Dr. Danis
10/20/2021