Courage to Advocate

*I asked one of my nurse friends for a story about courage.  She told me this story about having the courage to advocate for patients.  The wording is a work in progress*

The courage to advocate for your patients is also required in nursing.  My dear friend Candace has been a nurse for over twenty-five years.  She told me a story of a time she had to advocate for one of her patients.  She was working in the recovery ward monitoring patients fresh out of surgery.  In this ward, vitals are taken every ten minutes and nurses hardly ever leave their patient’s bedsides.  Candace was working with a patient who had just been wheeled out of a minor surgery.  This patient was young, had no complications and had a healthy heart.  But Candace read through the patient’s files and saw this patient had been given a large dose of beta-blockers five times the normal amount per the anesthesiologist’s orders and now the anesthesiologist wanted an equally large dose to be administered again.  However, Candace knew beta-blockers are used to slow the hearts of patients with heart rate or blood pressure issues and this patient had neither of these issues. Candace believed such large doses would be detrimental for this patient. 

So she called the hospital’s pharmacy to get a second opinion.  They agreed that such unusually large doses were a bad idea.  So Candace called the anesthesiologist who had prescribed these doses and explained her actions.  She told him she had received a second opinion and would not administer the dose he had prescribed.  The doctor exploded screaming into the phone while Candace calmly repeated herself.   Finally, he hung up only to get in his car and drive back to the hospital where he found Candace and began screaming again a mere six inches from her face.  Again, Candace refused to administer the large dose.  In the end, this doctor was reprimanded by the hospital board and told to apologize to Candace.  He never did.  When the board demanded an explanation for his dangerous prescription, the doctor said he had recently read an article saying large doses of beta-blockers may decrease a patient’s risk of stroke soon after surgery.  This doctor was trying to experiment on a patient with no permission or evidence to back his decision up.  His choice of patient did not even make sense because she was young and had a healthy heart.  If Candace had not had the courage to advocate for her patient, her patient may have received such a large dose of beta-blockers her heart may have stopped.