prepare for an emergency. As a surgical facility leader, you should ask
yourself if you'd be ready in a similar circumstance. If you're not,
you're leaving yourself wide open to a lawsuit. More importantly,
you're putting your patients at risk.
Concerning trend
Some facilities are making the news for all the wrong reasons. Across
the nation, we're reading about when surgery goes wrong. Some of
the mistakes are downright careless, such as empty oxygen tanks and
expired medications on the code cart. When patients need us to be at
our best, we can't fall short or get in our own way.
I'm not just a recovery room nurse and a nurse educator, but I also
work as a legal nurse consultant. It's my job to evaluate how well
facilities and their staff handle themselves in a crisis. In a lawsuit,
your culpability hinges on your ability to follow the standards of care.
Here are some of the basics you need to consider:
What's your plan? Long before you have an emergency, you
should craft an emergency plan and go over the essential roles.
All the members of the staff, from the assistants at the front desk to
the clinicians in the OR, need to know their role. During an emergency,
you should know who will meet the ambulance crews and who will do
CPR. You need a point person to organize the staff and to document
medications and event times. Having defined roles decreases confu-
sion in a crisis.
Emergency plans are not one-size-fits-all. A hospital outpatient sur-
gery center adjacent to an ER will have a much different emergency
plan than a freestanding ambulatory surgery center. If you perform
pediatric cases, you'll need to develop specific guidelines to that
patient population, as well.
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