Carol Weihrer visited an eye specialist that told her she had corneal erosion syndrome. Once she received this diagnosis, she decided she would go through treatments in order to try to better her quality of life. In 1998, she had had 17 operations but had gained no relief to her diagnosis. She then decided she would undergo an operation to remove her eye on January 14, 1998. Her troubles began that day but also led to a new journey for her. (Beck, 2005) Anesthesia is used in patients that are going to have an operation to alleviate them of the pain they would otherwise experience if they were conscious. Carol describes it as a two part medication. One part numbs the body so that the part of the body that is being operated will not be in pain.
(Griffin, 2013) Anesthesia awareness occurs when there is an error with the anesthesia given to the patient before or even during their operation. Some of the errors that can occur include dosage error. This occurs when a product is labeled wrongly which means that an individual can receive the wrong dose of the drug. Another error is delayed anesthesia delivery, which means that the means of giving the anesthesia is faulty such a leaky IV, syringe swapping troubles and other complications not within the operations. Commonly anesthesia awareness happens when a provider fails to properly monitor their patient. (Anethesia Errors, 2016) Carol was not watched to see if she was conscious, because her body was numb, she screamed and fought against herself to move a finger or any part of her body in order to let the surgeons know that she had awaken. She then heard a surgeon say that he she was awake. She waited for someone within the room to give her some kind of comforting word or assurance but no one did. The anesthesiologist then have her more medication. The belief is that this would have helped her go back to being unconscious but that was not the case for Carol. (Beck,
When errors occur such as turning off the alarm to the pulse oximeter then the provider is not notified when the oxygen level of a patient drops, resulting in tracheal damage from intubation, asphyxia, brain damage, loss of bodily function, coma and even death. And according to a study in Anesthesia and Analgesia, “nearly one-half of patients who experience anesthesia awareness will hear conversations in the operating room, half will feel as if they cannot breathe, and 28 percent will feel pain of surgery”! All this resulting from errors that can be
John B. Pollard, Ann L. Zboray, Richard I Mazze. The International Anesthesia Research Society. (1996).
Hospital medical errors can involve medicines (e.g., wrong drug, wrong dose, bad combination), an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis, equipment malfunction, surgical mistakes, or laboratory errors. High medical error rates with serious consequences occurs in intensive care units, operating rooms, and emergency departments; but, serious errors that harmed patients may have prevented or minimized. Understand the nature of the error
The term “safety comes first” or more simply put, “safety first,” is a message that patients not only want to hear, but also want to know is the focus of the professionals that are caring for them; in particular, when they are under anesthesia and have limited or no ability to speak up or lookout for themselves. The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) has implemented two initiatives; Rocognising and Responding Appropriately to Early Signs of Deterioration in Hospitalised Patients (NPSA, 2007) and How to Guide: Five Steps to Safer Surgery (NPSA, 2010). Understanding that human beings make up the healthcare professional workforce, it is evident that tools and checklist can and will only be as good as the how people utilize and follow them. Thus, these initiatives “have been developed with consideration of human factors” (Beaumont & Russell, 2012). I know firsthand, that if my healthcare team would have followed these standards, I would have avoided torture, fear, and long term side effects from a routine hysterectomy procedure.
Now let’s break down what General Anesthesia actually is. General Anesthesia makes you both unconscious and unable to feel pain during medical procedures. A study done by a team from Harvard Medical School, Weill Cornell Medical college, and the Massachusetts Ins...
Anesthesiologists take care of patients’ body signs while they are in surgery and also with their pain management during surgery (“Physicians” para. 10). During the surgery they give the patient anesthetics or drugs. These drugs help relieve pain the patient feels during their surgery or any other procedure (“Physicians” para. 10). They will also position the patient onto the operating table to make them feel comfortable and surgically accessible for surgery (“Anesthesiologist” What’s para. 1). Most use local, intravenous, spinal, or caudal methods to inject the anesthetic for sedation; the anesthesiologist prepares the patient for surgery (“Anesthesiologist” What’s para. 1). They record the types and amounts of amnesia used(“Anesthesiologist” What’s para. 1). They also watch over the patient’s body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate (“Physicians” para. 10). After the procedure, they decide when the patient has recovered from the anesthetic and is able to go home (“Anesthesiologist” What’s para. 1). Anesthesiologists can ...
Reducing surgical or any medical errors is a team work, everyone involve in the surgery has a crucial part to play to ensure quality health care is delivered and success of the surgery. For instance, if a nurse forgot to assess a patient’s vital signs or document/report any abnormal finding to the surgeon has made a big mistake that can lead to more complications or death of a patient. Also, patients who refused to adhere to the instructions given by the healthcare professional such as not to eat or drink, smoke, take over counter medication, before due to risk may impose during and after
Many hospitals have systems of checks and balances to avoid errors, but what happens when the systems do not work? Today in the United States, medical errors are the fifth-leading cause of death. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine released a study, “To Err is Human”, revealing an estimated 98,000 deaths annually from medical errors. While this figure is assumed to be lower than the actual, each death comes with an inherent cost to the health care system. In today’s terms this figure is underestimated, however the accompanied cost is estimated to be between $17 billion and $29 billion annually. According to Grober and Bohnen (2005), “Medical error can be defined as, “an act of omission or commission in planning or execution that contributes
It’s hard to leave a loved one in a hospital bed when night falls. Family members leave with a sense of responsibility, guilt, and sadness. They leave relying on the nurse to watch and care for their sick family member. Therefore, it is heart breaking to find out the next morning your loved one has suffered great brain damage due to nurses failing to check on alarm sounds. Now, the family is put on the spot to continue life support or disconnect their family member. One can only imagine what went wrong; up to the minute that you left the hospital, your loved one was doing fine. You are relying on the health care providers to take care of your loved one, just as you would, while you are gone. Staff made an error by ignoring the alarms sounds, warning them that the patient was deteriorating, and costing the patient’s family a great deal of pain. Jenifer Garcia’s life shattered when this exact event happened to her husband in July, 2010 (Kowalczyk, 2011). She left her husband Friday night, alive, and returned the next morning to find out he was brain dead. Advancements in technology are used to decrease and catch medical errors made by health care providers that can harm or kill patients, but alarm fatigue has proven that even technology cannot fully protect a patient from nursing errors, thus taking the lives of patients.
I have always been taught that you should never judge a book by it‘s cover. Something happened at birth that has greatly affected who I am today. I was born with a condition called lazy eye. Lazy eye syndrome is a condition where the eyes do not align properly, causing one or both eyes to weaken. If left untreated, the lazy eye does not develop properly. I inherited this from my dad, who also inherited the condition from his father. My mother first noticed I had eye problems when I was 2 months old and had my eyes examined. Because of my age, my doctor was reluctant to try surgery. So, my parents followed the treatment regiment and had me wear eye patches to help strengthen the weak eye. After 18 months of treatment, my doctor felt I was ready for surgery. Although some improvement was noticeable, it was too early to know if this would be the only surgery necessary to correct my eyes. I would have to continue to track my eyes through doctor examinations over the next few years to know if the surgery was completely successful.
A patient undergoing surgery has only a few concerns regarding a successful operation. The main priority is the efficacy of the operation itself. Equally critical to a patient, however, is the assurance of anesthesia. Precise methods of anesthesia application vary according to each patient’s physiological conditions. Clinical anesthesia use on the obese is particularly complex, posing dangers to the patients. As complications continue to arise from the use of anesthesia on the obese, mandatory measures such as additional anesthetist training should be implemented on all perioperative stages to reduce risks to this growing patient population.
I have been aware of medical errors for some time now. While in nursing school I have heard many stories from classmates and instructors of instances where people they knew, or loved ones had been either harmed or died because of a medical error. I have had experiences with medical errors. When I was in the hospital for the birth of my first child, the nurse that came to change out my IV bag did not check the
Anesthesia is used in almost every single surgery. It is a numbing medicine that numbs the nerves and makes the body go unconscious. You can’t feel anything or move while under the sedative and are often delusional after being taken off of the anesthetic. Believe it or not, about roughly two hundred years ago doctors didn’t use anesthesia during surgery. It was rarely ever practiced. Patients could feel everything and were physically held down while being operated on. 2It wasn’t until 1846 that a dentist first used an anesthetic on a patient going into surgery and the practice spread and became popular (Anesthesia). To this day, advancements are still being made in anesthesiology. 7The more scientists learn about molecules and anesthetic side effects, the better ability to design agents that are more targeted, more effective and safer, with fewer side effects for the patients (Anesthesia). Technological advancements will make it easier to read vital life signs in a person and help better decide the specific dosages a person needs.
Webster CS, Merry AF, Larsson L, McGrath KA, Weller J. The frequency and nature of drug administration error during anaesthesia. Anaesth Intensive Care 2001; 29: 494-500.
Regardless of efforts to decrease the occurrence of perioperative medication mistakes, however the errors remain an issue. There were examined done on 16 nurses who talked about medication errors in the perioperative environment and 11 other nurses who gave further information about perioperative mistakes, educating nursing staff, within that state. I have learned that the most frequently reported medication error was perioperative medication mistakes. There were other medication errors involved in intraoperative some examples are: medication administration, IV sedation, and "close call" events. Some of the reasons for medication errors are: making pressure, self-satisfaction, and failure to track established procedures. There was lack of
Everyday, people go through surgery and require a specialist that will monitor their surgery as well as give them what they need to be able to persevere the pain, which is exactly what anesthesiologists do. In order for the patients to be able to get into surgery and deal with the agonizing aches after the abscission, anesthesiologists have to give the sufferer the proper treatment before and after the surgery. Overall, anesthesiologists must be highly educated in both medicine and communication, they need to be able to give the patient the right amount of medicine as well as speak with the family of patients and other doctors to inform them all with what will be done during the surgery, and they need to be able to properly assist the surgeons during operations.